Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari

Barry speaks with Martín Escobari, Co-President and Head of Global Growth Equity at General Atlantic. Prior to joining General Atlantic in 2012, Martín served as Managing Director at Advent International and Co-Founder and CFO of Submarino.com, a leading Brazilian online retailer. He also spent time with The Boston Consulting Group. In addition to his current role, Martín is also Chair of General Atlantic's Global Growth Equity Investment Committee and he serves on the Executive and Portfolio Committees as well. On this episode, Barry and Martín discuss the challenges he faced as an entrepreneur, his time at General Atlantic, and the macro picture in South America. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. This is Masters in
Business with Barry Ritholts on Bloomberg Radio.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
This week on the podcast Well strap yourself in for
yet another fantastic conversation. Martine Escobari has an amazing background
that ultimately led him to be co president, head of
Global Growth Equity and head of the investment Committee at
private equity giant General Atlantic. They run over one hundred

(00:40):
billion dollars. The background in the story is fascinating, from
duty free shops to the Atlantic Philanthropies. Those were set
up in nineteen sixty nineteen eighty, respectively, and over the
ensuing forty five years, they just have carved their own
path and created their own expertise. They're kind of unique

(01:01):
amongst the global private equity or even domestic private equity players,
and that half of their people, half of their capital
has invested overseas, kind of unusual in that space. Martin
has just an amazing background. Born in Bolivia, built a
company in Brazil, educated in the United States. Just really,

(01:24):
there are a few people better situated to describe what
it's like being a growth equity investor, meaning you're not
investing in startups you're investing in companies that have started
to develop some scale and perhaps are turning profitable and

(01:44):
taking them to the next level. I thought the conversation
was fascinating, and I think you will also with no
further ado my conversation with General Atlantics Martin Escobodi.

Speaker 3 (01:59):
Perry. It is an honor and a privilege to be
here with you.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
Well, thank you so much for coming. I've been looking
forward to this in part because what you do is
so interesting, but also because your background is a little different.
You're born and raised in Bolivia. Tell us a little
bit about your upbringing and your experiences.

Speaker 3 (02:17):
The odds of me being here with you today are
about one in a million, right, I mean, I was
born in a town of ten thousand people. My parents
were communists and had disdain for capitalism. They spent their
life saving children's lives in public hospitals, and to them,
business people were so less, meaningless lives, and they expected

(02:38):
something very different from me. So that's sort of the
first set of unusual circumstances.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
I have to ask what was their response when you said, mom, Dad,
I'm going to Harvard.

Speaker 3 (02:48):
What is Harvard.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
Still? God and I been talking about the Business School knowledge. Yeah,
didn't register with them.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
And the accident that led me to Harvard is interesting.
I had a neighbor who was a school teacher at
the American School who became my mom's lifetime best friend.
I talked her into putting me in the American School,
and by chance, there was a very good American school
because some oil companies were funding great education for the kids.
And I got a great education. And then I got

(03:18):
a scholarship to Harvard and that is where I sort
of entered Hogwarts Academy of Wizardy and the doors of
the universe opened to me, and I was the first
Bolivian in three hundred and fifty years. Is that go
to Harvard College?

Speaker 2 (03:30):
Yeah, oh my god, that's amazing. So economics BA, and
then you get the NBA from the business school. What
was the career plan?

Speaker 3 (03:40):
So listen, I've up until recently been very disciplined about
setting up five year plans for myself and I keep them.
And if you looked at my five year plan when
I was in college, I was destined to go work
at the World Bank, help solve big problems in emerging markets.
One day get called back to my country to be

(04:00):
finance minister and then if I did a good job,
maybe have a shot at running Bolivia. That was the
plan coming out of college. I stumbled into business, I
fell in love, and that's how business school came about.
And then that's what I've been doing for thirty years.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
Finance Minister of Bolivia is fairly ambitious. But before we
get to that, you co found Submarino or Submarna. How
do you pronounce that? Submarino Submarno really one of the
earliest online retailers in Brazil. Tell us a little bit
about your experience there and what it was like being

(04:37):
an entrepreneur in Brazil in the nineteen nineties.

Speaker 3 (04:41):
So I believe each generation will have one giant wave,
one giant disruption that will catch us in our twenties
or thirties. For me, it was the Internet. Later, it
was the mobile Internet, the cloud. Now it's AI and
biotech revolution.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
But that sounds like four waves.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
That hit me in my twenties was the Internet, and
I had this realization that this is my one shot.
I don't know if you listened to the Hamilton musical,
there's my shot, the scrappy immigrant that's waiting for the
revolution where it's a level playing field and you're all
trying to catch this giant wave and the internet felt

(05:20):
at this amazing life changing opportunity, and I said, I
can't miss this adventure. And to me, together with two
other colleagues from the private equity group I was working
on out of business school, from the three g guys
said we're in the wrong side of this revolution. We
shouldn't be financing the startups, we should be creating the startups.
And we set out to build the Ali Baba or

(05:42):
the Amazon dot Com of Brazil. And it was seven
incredible years because it started great. We raised more money
than we could ever dream We almost went public, the
market shutdown, we almost went bankrupt. We had to sell
the pieces, we had to get the profitability, and then
we came back. So it was a compressed, you know,
thirty years of life into seven. But I felt I

(06:04):
did not miss the revolution of my generation.

Speaker 2 (06:07):
So New York City, in my recollection during the nineteen
nineties was just. There was a fire hose of cash
and capital over everything. It was a party. Apartment prices
were going up, restaurants, clubs, everything was just. It was

(06:27):
the Roaring twenties. All over again. You launched this in
Brazil in nineteen ninety nine, What was the economy like,
what was your experience like?

Speaker 3 (06:36):
So listen, the macro was horrible, but the technology was overwhelming,
and the sources of capital recognized that this was a
global opportunity. So we raised two hundred and fifty million
dollars as a private company, So before the correction of
March of two thousand, money was raiding. There was no infrastructure.
You had to build everything from zero. Everything was one

(06:56):
hundred times more difficult. But the advantage of Brazil is
we had not developed the brick and mortar retail infrastructure.
There were no superstores. The Brazilian consumer was starved variety
because all the supermarkets carried very limited assortment. So the
opportunity of e commerce, we believed, was ten times bigger

(07:16):
than in the US or Western Europe because we were
leapfrogging a whole stage of evolution of the retail format.
And it came to be. E Commerce in Brazil now
twenty five years later is close to twenty percent of
all trade. It is a vibrant, dynamic industry and there
are no category killers. We skipped that whole toys, r
us and babies are us and bad and bond phase

(07:40):
and that's good for the environment. So I was part
of a transformational moment together with my co founders, and
it was exciting, it was scary, and ultimately when we
sold it producing good returns for the investors, it was
very fulfilling.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
So what did that experience as an entrepreneur duty how
did that impact you years later as an investor? What
do you carry forward from that?

Speaker 3 (08:06):
So I've been an investor for twenty odd years. The
main lesson is the profound realization that the heroes of
the journey are not the investors, are the people that
are in the front lines and the trench lines. It
is so hard to create out of nothing something that thrives.

(08:27):
It is in human level of sacrifice that these people
go through. And I have so much respect for the
heroes of the journey, and I remind my colleagues we're
just the supply lines.

Speaker 2 (08:39):
They're on the front lines. You're just supriy and you're
just supplying the AMMO and the material to do what
they have to do. That's really interesting. So let's discuss
some of the things you've talked about. When you discuss
investing in entrepreneurship. One of the themes that keeps coming
up that I've read in some of your notes is

(09:01):
the unpredictability of the world. How do you think about
making investments for five or ten years out when the
world is just so unpredictable.

Speaker 3 (09:12):
So I grew up in Bolivia in the eighties. It
was chaos, chaos that it's hard to internalize. So in
my teenage years ten years, there were nine presidents. In
my teenage years, there was thirty five thousand percent inflation.

(09:33):
What that meant is halfway through my teenage years, we
changed currencies from the peso Boliviano to justin Boliviano by
chopping off six zeros. Wow, one million US dollars becomes
one American. That happened when I was fifteen, So I
get I grew up with chaos, and I got comfortable
with chaos. And what the main lesson of chaos is

(09:56):
it's never as bad as it seems, and it's always
dark right before the sun is going to come out,
and you have to believe the sun is going to
come out and plan for the sun. And as it
relates to a world that's highly unpredictable. Remember, the sign
is going to come out and stay through to first
principles and what makes great businesses, and who are great
entrepreneurs and who's solving real world problems and lean in

(10:19):
when everyone else is scared.

Speaker 2 (10:21):
So I want to talk a little bit more about
your upbringing, but I want listeners to understand the genesis
of General Atlantic and where it comes from. So let's
talk a little bit about Chuck Feeney, which I had
no idea about when I started doing my homework here.
So in nineteen sixty in Hong Kong, he founds the

(10:46):
first duty fee shop in the airport in Hong Kong.
Right now, to the US travelers, duties aren't a big deal.
Buy makeup, we buy it, booze, whatever it is, it's
more or less the same price at home. But if
you go to Europe, if you go to parts of Asia,
there are like substantial taxes, and buying these things at

(11:10):
the airport duty free real substantial savings in money. So
he launches duty free Shops dfs in nineteen sixty. By
nineteen eighty, it's so successful that they have to set
up General Lannik to manage the philanthropy that he's now doing.

(11:33):
Tell us a little bit about Chuck Feeney and how
GA was established.

Speaker 3 (11:39):
Chuck is one of the most impressive people I've ever
got a chance to meet. He stumbled into the duty
free idea as a soldier because he was mesmerized by
the vibrant trade that happened in the American bases in
the Pacific. So you could buy cigars, liquor appliances half
off because it wasn't America, and it wasn't the Philippines.

(12:00):
Was no man's land in this area, and the taxes
were very high in those regions, so there was a loophole.
He created the world due to free business, which thrived
to a major business. He landed upon a level of
wealth he was not ready for, to say the least,
and he questioned, what is the purpose of my wealth?

(12:21):
And he thought about it for a long time. And
I've heard him tell the story. He's now diseased two
years ago, and he says, the purpose of my wealth
is to improve the human condition today, not tomorrow, not
one hundred years from not through foundation today. And he
created General Atlantic as his family office, or the vehicle
to manage his family wealth. He wanted us to invest

(12:41):
in innovation and entrepreneurship globally, and he wanted all the
proceeds of our investment activity to go finance the great
causes anonymously. He was the originator of the giving pledge,
except it wasn't fifty percent, it was one hundred percent.
He famously said, I want my last check to bounce.
Almost succeeded it when he died. He donated nine billion

(13:03):
dollars over his lifetime, most of it anonymously, and at
the later stages of his life he says, I actually
need to tell my story because it maybe it motivates
other people to follow this incredibly rewarding path, which is
to spend my life giving away my wealth. And that
he did, and he set us off on this incredible
forty five year journey of backing innovators wherever they may

(13:24):
be in the world. And that's what we are today,
and that's what we've been doing for forty five years.

Speaker 2 (13:29):
And to fill in some of the blanks that some
people may not be aware of. Duty Free Shoppers Limited
is now owned by Luxury Giant LVMH and General Lannik
evolved from his family office to manage money for the
philanthropies to a leading growth and innovation investor with now

(13:52):
more than one hundred billion dollars in assets under management.
Tell us a little bit about what General at Atlantic
has been doing for the past forty five years to
build up those returns to that degree. I'm assuming there
are lots of distributions along the way as well.

Speaker 3 (14:09):
Yes, yes, So we started investing in technology in the
United States and soon discovered that technology is not just
changing the technology sector, but it's changing the healthcare sector
and the financial services. Then we discovered that this is
a global opportunity. We opened up Europe thirty years ago,
we opened up the emerging markets twenty two years ago,
and now we've built what we think is the most experienced,

(14:32):
scaled growth equity investor in the world. Now, growth equity
has become incredibly competitive. It's now a two trillion dollar
asset class. Why is it so large because there are
more companies that are growing thirty forty percent. Why because
they're embracing technology to change their business and that allows
for faster growth at cost efficient metrics. How do we
compete in this highly competitive world? We have more experience

(14:55):
forty five years of track record, great brand, five hundred
investments over the last forty five years. We have scale.
We have two hundred and fifty investment professionals. We have
ninety operators in the Operators group. We have tech enabled sourcing.
We meet seven thousand entrepreneurs every year to pick the
best twenty five. So this is a scale game. We

(15:16):
have this scale, and then we also have specialization. There
are sixteen strategies we call them the GA Power Alleys,
where we've developed ten and twenty year track record. That's
a huge source of competitive advantage. And then we have
nineteen local offices throughout the world. In every local market,
we are more local than the local players, and we

(15:37):
have the advantage that we are plugged into this global
network of knowledge and accumulated experience that the GA infrastructure
provides thro all our local partners.

Speaker 2 (15:46):
So let's start out why we're even having this conversation.
Not only did Chuck Feeni make most of his donations
anonymously and gave away billions and billions of dollars with
no name attached, but GA has historically been kind of
a low profile shop, so I think listeners may not

(16:07):
really know some of the details of how the firm
invests and the key areas you focus on. So let's
start out talking about those five sectors, which are technology,
consumer services, financial services, healthcare, and life sciences. And I
know you get into a lot of specific details, and

(16:29):
each of those five sectors have tons of subsectors. Tell
us a little bit about the areas GA focuses on.

Speaker 3 (16:36):
Listen, the sectors of how we are organized internally. What's
more interesting is what are the trends changing our world today.
There are four mega trends that define the opportunity set
for growth equity. First is the digital transition. Ninety percent
of the world's transactions are going digital. Four trillion dollars
of capitalists invested every year in this digital transition, in

(16:59):
the invest in AI in cloud computing. This is a
trend that's twenty years in the making. It's been accelerated
by AI massive wave. The second one is health care innovation.
Huge challenges in the West. Healthcare is too expensive and ineffective.
The only way to address that is through technology to
drive better health outcomes. In parallel, there's a new generation

(17:22):
of health care innovation that is using the advances of
it to apply it to the cell and creating the
next generation of life sciences therapeuties which will dramatically change
our health span. So that's another mega wave that's very relevant.

Speaker 2 (17:35):
By the way, I love the phrase health span as
opposed to lifespan. Of course, the idea is to not
just live long, but be healthy for as long as
you possibly can.

Speaker 3 (17:44):
I'll give you one scary statistic. Ninety five percent of
Americans die in hospitals. Only three percent of American doctors
die in hospitals.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
Huh.

Speaker 3 (17:53):
It's not about the quality of your death, it's the
quality of your life and your health span. As you said, Okay,
so healthcare innovation huge area, our biggest, one of our
biggest sectors energy transition. To get to our decop organization targets,
we will need to spend north of six trillion dollars
a year. That's a huge opportunity. The whole ecosystem around
this trend to net zero. And the fourth major mega

(18:16):
trend is the rise of the new consumer. The sort
of younger middle class rising and purchasing power in the
rest of the world will mean six trillion dollars of
extra consumption by twenty thirty. In this emerging new middle class,
these four mega trends define the growth equity opportunity set.

Speaker 2 (18:35):
I find it interesting that you're discussing mega trends that
are global, in large part because I think this is
an accurate statistic. Is General Atlantic the only private equity
growth shop that has half of its assets and half
of its people abroad? Like, only half of your capital

(18:59):
and people are in the.

Speaker 3 (19:01):
Are you the only one among the top ten in
the world. Yes, we are more global than anyone else.
Why are we more global than anyone else? I'll give
you two statistics. Half the unicorns, the sort of billion
dollar companies in the world, are born outside the United States.
More interestingly, half the unicorns in the United States are

(19:23):
founded by immigrants from other parts of the world. So
seventy five percent of value creation is for people that
were in this world, people not born in US. Talent
is sprinkled around the eight billion souls that inhabit the earth.
We got to go where the talent is, and in
our case, it means half of what we do is
in the US and half is outside the US. And

(19:45):
our activities outside the US have been a creative to returns.

Speaker 2 (19:48):
So let's talk about some of the other areas that
are outside you come from South America. But let's talk
generally emerging markets. Where do you look around the world
for this talent.

Speaker 3 (20:03):
Listen, we have presence all over the world. We have
three offices in China, we have offices in India, we
have offices in Singapore, two in Latin America. We opened
offices in two of three offices in the Middle East.
What's exciting right now? And India. We've been in India
for twenty two years, and India did not have its
moment in the sun. Digital India wasn't ready. India infrastructure

(20:27):
wasn't ready. It has been ready for the last five years.
The business models, the digital business models that we saw
transform industries in China and Brazil in Mexico had not
yet done that in India. Over the last five years,
India did a couple of reforms. First demonetization taking currency
away and simplification of the tax code. Meant the informal

(20:50):
economy went from fifty percent to twenty five percent.

Speaker 2 (20:53):
When you say informal economy, we not black market, we
just not paying taxes. Just cash economy.

Speaker 3 (20:59):
Gosh economy, you don't have a credit, you don't it
doesn't count.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
Kind of reminds me of the study they did in
Greece where you have to pay tax on the pools
and satellite images show there's something like twenty x number
of pools. Then there are people paying taxes exact. So
that was a modi change.

Speaker 3 (21:18):
That was a modi change. Second change is the transformation
of digital India, which is Internet access was expensive and
not very available. The telecom sector restructure around GEO, which
is a great telco company, and now sixty percent of
Indias have low cost wireless broadband. In parallel, the government
created a national biometric identity database that enabled fraud free

(21:39):
digital transactions from your phone, and now sixty percent of
all transactions are in India are digital. All of a sudden,
you have one of the most digital economies in the world.
The final missing link their own capital markets, domestic saving
gone up. They have certain restrictions around foreign domestic savings
for individuals investing abroad, so they're investing in their local markets.

(22:00):
The best IPO market of the last two years in
the world has been India. So now you have the
confluence of three factors that create what we think will
be a virtuous next ten years for India, which is
about time. Latin America is seven hundred million inhabitants, rising
middle class, trading at all time low multiples. You can

(22:22):
buy the entire country of Brazil at ten times earnings. Mexico,
there is no better candidate or beneficiary of the trend
to French shoring than the Mexican economy. The Chinese per
hour worker is thirty percent cheaper than the Chinese worker
and their next door.

Speaker 2 (22:38):
The Mexican workers. The Mexican cheaper than China.

Speaker 3 (22:41):
Than China today and their next door and they're your friends.
They're not a geopolitical challenger to the US. So I
see another great decade for Latin America in the next
in the next years ahead.

Speaker 2 (22:53):
So you mentioned the IPO market in India doing so well.
I got to ask, We've seen in two going on
three years of pretty mediocre IPO offerings and very few
IPOs actually come in to market. How do you look
at this environment? What do you think happens with the

(23:14):
IPO pipeline here?

Speaker 3 (23:16):
So, the growth equity opportunity set is the cheapest it's
been in twenty five years. The price for growth that
we're being asked to at to pay is the cheapest
I've ever seen in my career, and I've been around.
Why is it to cheap? Exactly for what you just said, Berry,
We've gone three and a half years without a vibrant
IPO market in the United States. That is really long.

(23:39):
This is the longest period in recorded history. The second
longest this century was eighteen months starting in March of
two thousand. We estimate there's about three thousand companies waiting
to go public. This is about eight hundred globally. Globally right,
more than half in the US. But it is a
backlog of eight hundred billion dollars of stock that hasn't

(24:00):
been able to move. And that's why we're seeing such
attractive pricing in the growth equity space. It's mostly hunting
in these tired cap tables, pressure gps that need to
show DPI and companies that aren't able to go public. Now,
what does it take for the IPO market to open up?
Historically you need three things. One is you need positive
S and P five hundred performance for the trailing two years.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
So we have that.

Speaker 3 (24:24):
We have that. We need low and stable, relatively low
and stable VIX check.

Speaker 2 (24:29):
Well, not so much this quarter this quarter.

Speaker 3 (24:32):
A little up. Maybe maybe some headroom there when some headwinds.
The third one is you need six IPOs that pop.
We haven't had that, but I think you know, conditions
are set for the market to open at some point
in this year, and when they do, it will unlock
a lot of value. Now, this location is going to
take a while to flow through because a good IPO

(24:54):
market moves about two hundred billion dollars of stock. I said,
there's eight hundred billion dollars of backlog. It will take
two to three years to for pricing conditions to normalize.

Speaker 2 (25:03):
And you mentioned the third thing you mentioned that we
need is six IPOs to pop. What happens does it
just shift the psychology and suddenly people.

Speaker 3 (25:13):
Aren't Fomo replaces fear.

Speaker 2 (25:15):
Hmm, that's really interesting, Fomo replaces fear. What about the
current political climate is it conducive? You know, the current
president got elected, the expectation was, hey, we'll have some
tax cuts, there'll be some capital gain tax cuts, there'll
be some deregulation. That feels like it was sort of

(25:36):
put on the back burner while we're dealing with tariffs
and doze and everything else. And mister market hasn't been
especially happy about that. Is this just a temporary setback?
What do we have to do to get to that
IPO pipeline that awaits us?

Speaker 3 (25:53):
Listen, there's more uncertainty in the world than usual, and
predicting that macro is hard. When faced with uncertainty, Diversify globally,
diversify and focus on the highest quality companies, and the
uncertainly becomes less determinant to your faith. Predicting the US

(26:15):
politics for the next four weeks is impossible. For the
next six months is virtually even harder. So please don't
take me there. The solution to the uncertainty is diversification.

Speaker 2 (26:25):
And quality makes a lot of sense. You have described
your favorite business model to invest in as we like
beautiful business models. What makes a business model beautiful?

Speaker 3 (26:38):
Yeah, you have to capture gross margin. You have to
sell the unit you produce at a markup to what
the cost of production is. The bigger the margin, the
more beautiful you are. Now the beauty that's a picture
of beauty. What's really relevant about beauty is is lifetime beauty?
Is that gross margin pencible or will it be eroded

(27:02):
away by the competitors that see your beautiful gross margins.
And the real question about it is the durability of
the beauty. And you get durability when you have moat,
and you get moat when you have economies of scale,
economies of scope, learning externalities, network effects, agility. What are
the conditions that this team has to create gross margin
and have and build a humongous, beautiful moat that allows

(27:25):
us to be a lifetime gross margin hopefully an increase
in gross margin?

Speaker 2 (27:30):
How do you evaluate those things? A lot of those
items you checked off don't show up in a balance sheet?
How do you figure out what managers or models are agile?

Speaker 3 (27:44):
It helps when you're specialized in a business model. So
one of our power allys is investment management. And I'll
tell you one long story to bring a power alley
to life. In the late in the mid nineties, we
looked at the wealth management industry in the United States
and it was eighty percent concentrated retail banks. The guy
that was selling you the mortgage the checking account was
also selling your four oh one a K and your brokerage,

(28:05):
and the fees were high and the service was poor.
We took the bat that eighty percent would come down
and Sure enough, of the following decade, eighty percent came
down to ten percent. They were disrupted by Schwab a Merritrade,
e Trade, Fidelity Vanguard. We invested in e Trade twenty
seven times multiple within seven.

Speaker 2 (28:24):
Years, sold to Morgan Stanley, eventually.

Speaker 3 (28:27):
Sold tomorrow after long after we were gone twelve. In
twenty twelve, when I started ATJA, we looked at the
Brazilian market and the four retail banks had ninety nine
percent share, and we said, this smells like something we've
seen before. We backed one of the disruptors. Ninety nine

(28:48):
percent dropped to seventy eight percent. This company multiplied itself
that one hundred times. We've done the same thing in
India with IFL Wealth, in China with food Too. We're
doing it again in Mexico with clar So. A lot
of this future telling is pattern recognition, and the more
you have done in a power alley, the easier it
is to recognize these patterns.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
So I'm fascinated by not only general ATLANTICX global footprint,
but your international experience. How did your upbringing in Bolivia
and your entrepreneurship in Brazil influence this career path you've taken.

Speaker 3 (29:26):
Bolivia taught me about chaos. Brazil taught me about profiting
from chaos. So one of the interesting experiences is at
the darkest moment of the night, when so Money was
almost bankrupt, I decided I had almost lost hope at
emerging markets investing, and I decided, like I typically do,
to treat it like a research project. And I convinced

(29:48):
a professor from Harvard to do a project with me
where we studied ten incredible Brazilian companies that had thrived
in the nineties and become multi billion dollar corporations and
compare them to ten competitors of theirs that didn't thrive.
And we took it. We did five hundred interviews, We
wrote this book, which I gave you a copy of,
and I hope you'll enjoy it. And the big inside

(30:11):
is that in moments of chaos, there is a once
in a generation opportunity to do a transformational change to
your business. And the masters of this, and there's ten
examples in the book, but the masters of this is
the Three G guys. And what the Three G guys
set out to do is what I call spearfishing, and
they actually physically are spearfishers. They go on the weekend.

(30:31):
And the beauty of spearfishing I've done since is you
don't swim towards the fish. You choose an area full
of fish. You dive down without a tank, just you
under your spear, and you hold your breath for three
to five minutes waiting for the fat fish, and then
when he appears, you have two seconds to make the kill.

(30:52):
And that's what they do. And their journey was so
they're investment bankers. They had the number one investment bank
in Brazil. Too much cash. They wanted real assets. They
were hunting for a large asset that had characteristics of
an industry that would benefit once inflation stopped. That was
their bed and they the weight it. And a week

(31:12):
before a momentous election, the Swiss owners of the number
two beer company panicked and they sold their business in
two days. They bought it Big Fish. Then they waited
ten years. They made that business really profitable, really efficient,
and then another crisis, when the number one beer company
was in difficulties, they pounced again. And they did it
again twenty years later when Anheuser Bush was in the

(31:34):
Great Crisis of the Great Financial Crisis, and they struck
globally creating the So this idea that in moments of chaos,
there's opportunities to do once in a generation ten x
bets is an insight that has allowed me to navigate
the volatility in all the emerging markets, because chaos visits
more frequently the emerging markets.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
So we've seen some growth in emerging markets over the
past few years. What are the areas. I know you're
focused on some of the mega trends, but what parts
of the world are you looking at? What's attractive outside
of the United States for the half of general nic
that's not domestic.

Speaker 3 (32:16):
Yeah, listen, what we've tried to do in the emerging
markets is to focus on the big problems. Turns out
there are bigger problems in the emergent markets, and if
you can find a digital solution to a big problem,
you're likely going to be able to build a beautiful
business with gross margin that has a mote. So renting

(32:37):
an apartment we were just talking before about the rental market.
It's hard in the US. In Brazil, it's almost impossible
because eighty percent of the listings are fake. They're they're
just a broker trying to get you. Oh that one
just sold, but let me show you three other ones
that I have. Buying a used car is hard in
the United States. In Mexico, you may discover what you

(32:57):
bought is not actually a car. So if you create
a platform that creates a transactional platform education, huge problems
in education. If you create a supplier that provides a
digital curriculum, we now have a company in Brazil that
teaches three million kids a day or with a digital
curriculum that's self learning using AI blah blah blah. So
big problem, big solution. Another one, for example, turns out

(33:19):
Brazil and Mexico and number one and number two in
the world and fraud an identity fraud. We are absolutely
world class fraudsters. In my neck of the woods, we
have two companies, one focused in Mexico, one focused in
Brazil that use biometrics to zero out all fraud with
tremendous impact on financial inclusions. So our north star for
most of what we do in the emerging markets is

(33:42):
to find digital solutions to these big problems and hopefully
profit that way.

Speaker 2 (33:47):
I'm fascinated by the concept of biometrics of fraud and
digital solution and I want to roll back to what
you said previously about India, and it sounds like the
government putting in a set of biometric standards and then
building out a digital mobile solution. Not only does it

(34:10):
put some power in the hand of the consumers, at
the same time that's very trackable and they could collect
taxes on whatever's going on. Is that the model for
what you're seeing in Mexico and Brazil or are they
you know, very different issues.

Speaker 3 (34:29):
Same issue. Private solution, not a public solution, but it
addresses to one of the core beliefs I have, which
is a lot of the inefficiency and poverty outside the
US is there is no meritocracy. Biometrics allows for a meritocracy.
You can have a track record, you pay your taxes,

(34:52):
you show your formal you can borrow against it. If
you pay your loans, it is trackable, your interest rate
comes down. If your interest rate comes down, you can borrow,
and you can send your kid to a better college.
So this idea of you know, taking friction away and
bringing meritocracy forward is so mission critical and so unlocking
of value that it's very exciting to be able to

(35:14):
back the rails of that. And India has been a
role model on this.

Speaker 2 (35:17):
All right, So we've talked about India, We've talked about Mexico,
We've talked about Brazil. What other parts of the world
look interesting? Do you do stuff in Asia? What do
you do in Africa?

Speaker 3 (35:27):
Listen, Africa is the next frontier. We've done two initial
investments in Africa. It's still ten years away from growth, equity,
the rule of law still needs to work. We just
open offices. In the Middle East, the golf economy is vibrant,
entrepreneurship is thriving. Southeast Asia is having a pickup. We're
beginning to do more work in Japan. Japan, the next

(35:48):
generation of Japan is rediscovering its innovation routes that it
had in the nineties but lost for thirty years. So
all these places are very exciting. Now. The US is
incredibly exciting. It's half of what we do. It is transformational.
It's leading the AI revolution. AI is the defining, incredible

(36:08):
revolution of this generation of twenty five year olds, and
that's also very exciting. It's probably one of the most
exciting new power allies is what we see going on
in Ai.

Speaker 2 (36:17):
It makes sense that Africa is still not quite where
it needs to be, but I'm kind of intrigued by
other parts of Asia and Japan. Japan just feels like
it's years ahead of everybody. It just feels like the
future has arrived in Japan before it makes it to
everywhere else. What sort of opportunities are you seeing in Japan.

(36:40):
They feel like a prettymature, Western style, democratic brand of capitalism.

Speaker 3 (36:47):
Yeah, somehow Japan lost its innovation edge it had in
the nineties, and it had to do with a generation
that was not embracing of rapid change. And there's a
new generation of managers that are embracing rapid change. They
don't yet have a growth equity industry, but the great
in software, they're great in financial services, they're great in gaming.

(37:11):
So I think it's early, but I do see a
lot of innovation out of Japan and Southeast Asia. Vietnam
is super exciting. It's a net beneficiary of supply chain
diversification away from China. It is incredibly entrepreneurial, it's incredibly young.
We've made investments in the financial services sector where right
now looking at something in the healthcare sector that's also

(37:32):
very exciting.

Speaker 2 (37:33):
So for a long time, every time Japan comes up
someone always brings up they have big demographic problems they
can't get out of the way, And I'm hearing similar
things about China. How do you look at those issues
which are large and macro and somewhat intractable.

Speaker 3 (37:52):
That's a tough one. I think the aging of the West,
it creates a number of opportunities for healthcare services the
mission critical, and I think we have to invest in
making sure we work on the health spent issue. How
they solve those issues. My crystal ball is not perfect.
I am a big believer in immigration. The reason the

(38:13):
United States is not suffering from the same issues is
we've had very healthy legal immigration for the last thirty
years and that's refreshed and populated half the unicorns. So
I suspect part of the answer of the sort of
West that's aging is flexibilizing immigration.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
Right We've been pretty receptive to it. It looks like
we know Japan has almost no permanent resident immigrants, the
UK is turning away from it. Is this going to
just be an opportunity for countries that open up their
doors to the best and the brightest, or is this
an ongoing source of political fodder for left versus right.

Speaker 3 (38:58):
So this is a topic my sister cares really a
lot about. She dedicated her life to it. She was
most recently at the National Security Council focused on immigration. Yes,
I was just in Dubai two weeks ago. It's a
different Dubai. Some of the brightest minds of Europe have
moved to Dubai, attracted by the vibron metropolis that's setting
up there. They're low tax jurisdictions, low bureaucracy, whereas the

(39:22):
rest of Europe is taxing and making immigration harder and
ending than on THEMB Some countries like Dubai, like Singapore,
are opening up to the world and attracting the world's
best talent. Soon enough, we'll wake up and say, hey,
the United States can't lose this edge. I hope it does.

Speaker 2 (39:38):
I'm kind of fascinated by the transition that's taking place,
not just in Dubai but through large parts of the
Middle East that seemed to be shifting from you know,
oil regimes and plutocracies to much more I don't want
to say open societies, but certainly economic, freer societies than

(40:01):
they've been in the past. What is going on in
the Middle East to drive these changes.

Speaker 3 (40:09):
Brilliant governance, and the advantage of some having seen so
many natural resource rich countries squander it away with Dutch disease.
I think they've they got religious disease. Remember they got religion.
And they're making the right levels of investments and there's
so much innovation. We just invest in a company called Kayali.
It's a it's a perfume brand. It's a beautiful entrepreneur

(40:32):
who's created this concept which was new to me. It
turns out the gen z likes to do layering of perfumes,
which is to combine three, four five perfumes and create
your own blend. And this has built her whole brand
around this. That's and it's a global brand born in
the Middle East. How exciting is that? So I think
we're going to see more and more innovation in out

(40:53):
of the Middle East. And I think they're doing a
lot of things right.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
Some of the investments you've made over the years almost
sound like venture capital investments as opposed to private equity.
So social media, perfume, consumer goods, Like what is the
line between VC and growth equity?

Speaker 3 (41:13):
Yeah, we come in when you're profitable and scaled and
the risk we're taking is not whether you have product
market fit, but whether you can really scale to your
full potential. Our loss ratios, the sort of percent of
the time in which we lose money is three to
four percent.

Speaker 2 (41:29):
For the last so it's the opposite.

Speaker 3 (41:31):
The adventure is thirty forty percent, So I.

Speaker 2 (41:34):
Think it's even higher than this, even higher.

Speaker 3 (41:36):
So we come in when you are a late teenager,
not when you are a thriving young kid.

Speaker 2 (41:42):
A wizard kid, gotcha. So it sounds like, given that
half of your investing is outside of the United States,
you think there are tailwinds for growth markets, for emerging markets.
What are going to be the big drivers for gains
in these companies receives and in emerging markets?

Speaker 3 (42:02):
Listen, I think AI is the revolution that we were
talking about. Unlike the Internet or the mobile internet or
the cloud, this one is truly transformational because they will
touch about eighty percent of GDP. The previous waves touched
between ten and twenty percent. This is a four x
bigger wave. Every process we throw AI too, gets thirty

(42:26):
to forty percent more efficient in today's version of AI,
which will be outdated in about three weeks, so programmers
are more effective online marketing teams spend thirty percent less
call centers don't need any humans. Decision making enhanced with
a bot is better. So the proof points are already there,

(42:47):
and we're asking all our businesses, how will AI fundamentally
change your business model and get ahead of it investing AI,
which is one of the things we're doing. We stayed
away from the infrastructure layer sort of data in the
growth equity program, data centers, large language models, chips, capital intensive,

(43:09):
some technology risk that's hard to price. We've been focused
on the application layer sort of software companies that are
using proprietary data and AI to provide a new service.
And for the last four years we met eight hundred
companies and it was venture stage and evaluations were growth
equity stage, so bad combination. Finally, in the last six

(43:32):
months their growth equity stage. And we've just done three
major investments on AI, and I think we'll do dozens.

Speaker 2 (43:39):
Give us what are the three investments you've just made
in AI?

Speaker 3 (43:42):
So let me tell you about this company called Insider.
It's a software company enterprise marketing software companies. It helps
companies deliver the right message to the right person at
the right time, in the right media. This company was
founded in Turkey. Turkey has two things going for it.
Number one, huge gaming community and huge gaming programmer community,

(44:03):
so there's lots of programming talent. And because it's kind
of in Asia, but it's also in Europe, its population
uses we chat and what's Up. So they developed great
software that really worked with instant messaging for both the
West and the East, and they use this edge to
develop clients in Europe and in Asia. It's now one
hundred and thirty million dollar business is growing very fast, profitable,

(44:26):
the huge opportunities the US market. Turns out, the US
market is only now discovering instant messaging. We still send
emails to companies to inquire about our orders. The rest
of the world does not remember what it's like to
email a company.

Speaker 2 (44:39):
Really.

Speaker 3 (44:39):
That's so we all use we chat or what's Up.
Now there's an we think a window to bring insider
to the United States. US is half the market, but
only seven percent of insider sales. We're really strong in
the United States. We're going to help them grow. So
that's Insider. Another company's via Labs using AI for behavioral interventions,
helping the diabetics state of their medication, helping gym goers

(45:02):
go to the gym, reducing churn, all using AI to
provide behavioral nudges. Is ready entrepreneur in the US, building
in the US. And the fourth one is a Chilean
founder scholarship kid to n y U is created a
text to video program. You describe a scene, it produces

(45:22):
the video. He unlike JGBT, he trained it with permission,
so he has copyright right, which turns out if you're
in the image business, kind of important taking off like
fire and a super friendly, energized community builder of a team.
And it's a company called Runway dot Ai, which I
think will change the industry.

Speaker 2 (45:44):
Runway dot ai. All right, So those are three pretty
big investments, it sounds like. And you've specifically said, you're
not doing chips, you're not doing data centers, you're not
doing all the capital intensive things. You know. I've been
fond of saying it's not the Magnificent seven, it's the

(46:05):
other four hundred and ninety three companies in the SMP
five hundred that are going to see benefits from this.
So far, it seems like it's kind of few and
far between. How long does an innovation like AI take
to make its way out into the broader economy. The hope,
the wishful thinking is hey, everybody becomes more productive, more efficient,

(46:28):
more profitable, supports higher stock prices. What is the timeline like?
And I know you don't have a crystal ball, but
you're immersed in this. How do you see this unfolding?

Speaker 3 (46:40):
It's rapid, it's accelerating. But it's human nature to be
disappointed by the short term trajectory and wowed by how
deep it is five years from now. Like any exponential
we lose, we have a hard time imagining the power
of exponentials in five years it is going to be
massive and penetrated. Where the next twelve months disappoint, I

(47:01):
am sure they will disappoint.

Speaker 2 (47:04):
That's really interesting when you're thinking about a disruptive technology
like AI and making investments. Is it about the addressable market?
Is it about how global it can be? What's on
your checklist?

Speaker 3 (47:19):
Funny you mentioned checklist. So we do have a checklist,
But let me tell you a story of the GA checklist.
So when I became chairman of the Investment Committee seven
years ago, I felt grossly unqualified because my experience is
primarily emerging markets, and you know most of half of
what we do is develop markets. So I went to
the co founders of the firm, Steve Denning and Dave Hodson.

(47:42):
Incredible minds. These guys ran the firm for the first
twenty five years, incredible returns, geniuses. And I went to Steve,
and Steve was CEO for twenty five years. He's a
former Navy captain, McKinsey train, very very structured, and he says, Martin,
to build a checklist. Look at our deals, our best

(48:03):
performing deals. I'll share the three ms, and we'll talk
about the three ms and other characteristics, and then look
at the money losers and create a negative checklist. And
for God's sake, please produce the GA checklist. It was okay, checklist.
Same day I go to Dave Hodson. Dave Hodson PI
Beta Kappa dar Mud Stanford programmer, genius two hundred a

(48:26):
Q plus. Every time he speaks, I have to shut
my eyes and try to make sure I capture what
he's saying. And the first thing he says is resist
the temptation to have a checklist. If it was as
simple as a checklist, we wouldn't be paid two and
twenty to make the application of the checklist. And I
was like, oh my god, the two guys around the
firm for twenty five years can't agree on how to

(48:48):
make an investmentation through this. And I did some research
on this. You know, thinking fast, Sinking slow is the
checklist manifesto. But even the author of Shinking Fast and
Danny Callman, he came up. He stumbled into the checklist,
creating the checklist for interviewers for these really the French
Force elite units, and he used the checklist. But after

(49:11):
I found out and it was not in the book purposely,
there were these super interviewers that applied the checklist and
had not only eighty five percent accurateate, but a ninety
nine percent accurate. It turns out that's a big difference.
And it's best captured by this woman who was sort
of the master prognosticator. And what she would say is listen,
I do the work, I do the checklist, and before

(49:34):
I make a decision, I closed a notebook and see
how I feel in my gut. So the educated gut
is the way to make complex decisions.

Speaker 2 (49:47):
So you and I have talked about this in the past,
but let's bring that up. You know people talk about
investing as part art, part science. What you've said is
it's a combination of the gut and the brain, which
I think is roughly the same. How do you know
when you're using your brain and when you have to

(50:09):
defer to your gut. We talked about George Soros's back
pains as effectively his gut overrunning his brain. How do
you balance the two?

Speaker 3 (50:20):
Listen, You have to ignore the gut until you do
your homework. Do the work, do the analysis, do the
customer segmentation, the financial duets, do the market survey, do
this competitor service, do the cost analysis. After you fed
the gut with all that data, then you listen to
the system one gut, which is three million years old,

(50:44):
because it's likely to lead you in the right direction.
The gut is wise if you give it the right inputs.
If you let the gut guide you before you do
the work, you're likely to make mistakes.

Speaker 2 (50:56):
So let me throw you a couple of curve balls
before we get to our favor for questions. What drew
you to Lincoln Center? How do you contribute to its mission?
You also work with Primary Chance and with the endeavor
mentorship tell us a little bit about those sort of interests.

Speaker 3 (51:16):
So listen. I believe wealth is a unit of energy,
and if you just hoard it, you feel stuffy, slow,
and it's not good energy.

Speaker 2 (51:25):
It's got to be in motion.

Speaker 3 (51:26):
It's got to be in motion. So I run a
concentrated book. In my philanthropy, I put my time and
my wealth on a couple of things. I care deeply
about education, scholarships. I care deeply about entrepreneurship, and I
care deeply about music. Why do I care about music.
The cancer of our generation is tribalism in society, and

(51:49):
combat tribalism. I don't believe we should censor hate speech,
but we should promote love speech. And the best form
of love speech is live music. We're in a room
vibing to the same tune, breathing the same air, listening
to the o's, the ads, and the singing to the
same artists. We're all together. There's no racial there's no
income differential, there's no country differential. We're all vibing to

(52:10):
the same music. So mid Lincoln Center is about music
with endeavor, It's about promoting entrepreneurship across the globe. By
creating role models and mentorships. And I've been doing that
for twenty two years. I'm now in the global board
trying to make take this into even more countries and
then scholarships, premier chance and I do it also with Harvard.

(52:31):
I do it also with my high school in Bolivia.
Talent is sprinkled globally find those perils wherever they are.
Premier chans is quite interesting. It turns out the Bolivion,
the Brazilian public education system, test kids in the math
Olympics when they're thirteen, and they only use this data
to provide five kids to come meet the president and
they all get met live. Yeah, they choose five. There's

(52:55):
a lot of data about some other kids. So what
Primitra Chansi does is it goes to rule Northeast. This
is the poorest area of Brazil, the most unfair in
the world, finds these thirteen year old geniuses and helps
them get into good high schools in major cities and
eventually get into great colleges. So that's one of the
interventions on the education sector.

Speaker 2 (53:16):
Huh. My last curveball question had something has to do
with something you said about when you were an undergraduate
picking up some extra cash bartending, and you actually bartended
at a Harvard Business School reunion. Tell us a little

(53:36):
bit about that experience. I kind of really like that story.

Speaker 3 (53:40):
So I was eighteen years old. I bartended at all
sorts of reunions, and the most interesting reunions were the
twenty fifth and thirtieth reunion from both the college and
the Business School, because in both I used to have
a name tag and it said my name Bolivia and
how old I was. I think there were like thirty
people that came up. Some of them drunk look at me.

(54:02):
Some of them touched my cheek. I said, you're so young,
please enjoy it. Soon you'll be me, and it will
be a flicker of a turn of an eyelid. It
will be a second and you'll be me. And I
had forgotten this story. It was odd at the time.
I thought it was a little awkward. I was at
my thirtieth reunion and there was this young woman from

(54:23):
Finland who was seventeen years old, and I went up
to her and said, oh, please do enjoy your life
because it flows by in a second. And then I
remembered I was heir a second ago. The big insight,
and it takes us to get to the old age
to fully appreciate it. If you take stock, what percent
of your mental time are you in the past and

(54:46):
are you in the future. And for a lot of
young people, seventy percent of their time is not in
the present. And if you want to savor life and
breathe and savor the air you're breathing, you need eighty
percent of your mental time to be here now, today
with you and the sooner you get there. I mean

(55:07):
Confusion says this a great line. He says, every man
has two lives. The second one starts when you recognize
you only have one. And I just wish people get
to that realization in their thirties, not in their fifties,
when they're going to their thirtieth three union.

Speaker 2 (55:22):
Huh. Really interesting that the days are long but the
decades are short, exactly. I've always been a fan of that.
All right, So let's jump to our favorite questions that
we ask, starting with what's keeping you entertained these days?
What are you watching or listening to?

Speaker 3 (55:37):
White Lotus is a household favorite. I love Mike White.
He is a sophisticated storyteller.

Speaker 2 (55:44):
This so far seems to be the best season of
the three. I don't know what your experience was. I
know people love the first season.

Speaker 3 (55:52):
I love the second season. I got the Latin flair
going for me right, But this one is keeping up.

Speaker 2 (55:59):
This one just feels to be no spoilers. I hated
the ending of the second season, not the outcome, just
the way they did it. They could have reached the
same conclusion in a less annoying fashion. But especially Thailand
is so fascinating the way this is unfolding. But it's
been really interesting.

Speaker 3 (56:19):
It's gorgeous, and I'm a big fan of Mike White.
A great way I connect with my teenage daughter is
watching Saturday Night Live, not just the current but the old.
Lorne Michaels is a genius. He stayed fresh for fifty years.
And a great way to cross the intergenerational gap is
to show that us old people were once young and

(56:42):
our humor was actually kind of edgy. We're not just
these old parts that were to be grown to be.
Once upon a time, our generation had its shot. So
that's something else I spend time.

Speaker 2 (56:52):
Every generation thinks that people came before them didn't have
a childhood, and then suddenly it's like, oh, I get it.
You have to kind of live it to realize. Oh okay,
I was a little quick to judge back then exactly.
Let's talk about mentors who helped influence and shape your career.

Speaker 3 (57:10):
Listen, I've had the pleasure of working with six great investors,
the guys at three G, some people at Advan, Steve Dave,
and Bill Ford at GA, and having sat in three
different investment committees. There's a game I used to play,
which is every unique investor has a perspective that frames
their worldview. I would try to learn and predict what

(57:34):
they're going to say in the investment committee. And the
moment I got to eighty percent accuracies, Okay, I get it.
I got it. I get it how Steve Denning thinks,
I get it, how Bill Ford thinks. And my investment
style is a mixture of all these six great investors
that had the honor of working with. And I hope
I am utterly unpredictable when someone tries to do this

(57:57):
to me, because I hope my worldviews fluid enough that
it doesn't cannot be predicted at the eighty percent accuracy
level that that I was able to do.

Speaker 2 (58:07):
So let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites?
What are you reading right now?

Speaker 3 (58:12):
So there are three books that change my life as
a twenty year old. I read Tony Robins Awakened the
Giant Within. I know it's cheesy, I know it's help.
It is a fabulous people love it. It is fabulous.
It's about controlling your emotion and charting your own destiny
as a hungry twenty year old. It calmed the hell
out of me, really that it was life changing, and

(58:35):
I am forever grateful for to Tony, and I am
a big proponent and he's an incredible human being.

Speaker 2 (58:41):
I am reluctant to call things cheesy where there is
a ground swell of support and just endless testimonials like
you just gave that said, hey, you may not love this,
but this really helped me through this challenge and I'm
better for it. So I don't know, I think it's
a little too blase, too glib to just say, oh,

(59:05):
it's cheesy. What did that book sell? Like ten million?

Speaker 3 (59:08):
A million copies? And if you've never met him, see
I'm not your guru. At Netflix, and you'll get a
chance to feel his energy. Oh really, he's amazing. You
should totally see that.

Speaker 2 (59:16):
I'm not your guru. Al Right, I'm going to put
that on my list. What are the other two?

Speaker 3 (59:20):
So Victor Frankel meant in search of purpose? I read
it five times in my list. My purpose keeps changing.
And then we talked about this. I really am a
fan of Gentis kanon The Making of the Modern World.
It was a super interesting book because it defied the
stereotype that this was a savage, ruthless conquer He was

(59:41):
an incredibly sophisticated man that built the largest empire, built
in bigger than the Roman, bigger than the Roman, bigger
than the Ottoman. Only the British had a bigger empire,
and he had rule of law. He was married toocratic
He embraced diversity, He invested in the arts, he was portrayed.
He was pro interchange of ideas and built something unheard

(01:00:04):
of at the time before technology. It was seventeen percent
of the world's land under one empire. That a single man,
an orphan, a nomad built in the twelve hundreds.

Speaker 2 (01:00:17):
Beautiful, arguably not just a military genius, but a governmental
societal genius, able to not just conquer, but keep the
empire together, which is always the challenge. The Romans spread
themselves too thin. You could say the same about the

(01:00:38):
Spanish Empire or the British Empire. He managed to maintain
this throughout his entire life.

Speaker 3 (01:00:43):
And lived through the right page of sixty five twice
the life expectancy of his era.

Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
Which is pretty impressive. Our final two questions, what sort
of advice would you give to a recent college grad
interested in a career in either growth, equity or investing,
or anything along those lines.

Speaker 3 (01:01:02):
As I think of the twelve junctures where I had
to make life changing career choices, I always took the
most adventurous route, choose the most adventurous route, and don't
do it alone.

Speaker 2 (01:01:17):
Bring someone, don't play it safe.

Speaker 3 (01:01:19):
Don't play it safe. At the end of the day,
he who has the best stories wins.

Speaker 2 (01:01:26):
And you were before I interrupted, you were about to say,
bring someone along with you.

Speaker 3 (01:01:29):
Bring someone along, And that's what There's two points like
Robert Frost and Walt Wildman. Roberts Frost's journey, the road
less travel is a lonely journey. Walt Whitman's is about
opening the road you know and bringing, extend out a
hand and give you my he says, I give you
my love. Bring someone you love along. And the most

(01:01:51):
important decision of a man's life or a woman's life
is who your life partner is. Bring someone along on
this adventure because it's twice as fun if you can
reminess in your old age about all the great twists
and turns that life throws me in.

Speaker 2 (01:02:04):
You And our final question, what do you know about
the world of investing today? You wish you knew thirty
or so years ago when you were first getting started.

Speaker 3 (01:02:15):
From Warren Buffett. You only have tw twenty slots in
your life? Was your investor wait for the big fish,
don't waste them on marginal opportunities. You don't eat mark
to market, only cash on cash counts. And the final one.
If you think like the crowd, you're destined to mediocrity.

Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
You're destined to perform like the crowd.

Speaker 3 (01:02:38):
Exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:02:39):
Huh really interesting? Thanks Martin for being so generous with
your time. We have been speaking with Martin Escobari. He
is co president and head of Global Growth Equity at
General Atlantic. The firm manages over one hundred billion dollars
in assets If you enjoy this conversation, we'll be sure

(01:03:00):
and check out any of the past five hundred and
fifty we've had over the previous ten and a half years.
You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Bloomberg, wherever
you find your favorite podcasts. And be sure and check
out my new book, How Not to Invest The Ideas,

(01:03:20):
numbers and behavior that destroys well out now wherever you
find your favorite books. I would be remiss if I
did not thank the Crack team that helps with these
conversations together each week. Steve Gonzalez is my audio engineer.
Sean Russo is my head of research. Anna Luke is
my producer. I'm Barry Retults. You've been listening to Masters

(01:03:44):
in Business on Bloomberg Radio.