Tren Griffin
@trengriffin
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I work for Microsoft. Previously I was a partner at Eagle River, a private equity firm established by Craig McCaw. I am on the board of directors of Kymeta.
Seattle, Washington
Joined February 2009
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My 93 year old father just gave me permission to reveal a Griffin family secret:
You create incredible value without any monetary cost, fiat or otherwise, by being kind to people, being trustworthy, showing up for causes you believe in and standing up for what's right.
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Let's do this.
1/ Buffett: "Most people come to our meeting to hear Charlie. At 96 he is in fine shape. It didn't seem like a good idea to have him come to this meeting. Charlie is in fine shape and he will be back next year." Charlie is now doing video streaming meetings.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: “People with very high expectations have very low resilience—and unfortunately, resilience matters in success."
Charlie Munger: "The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations, you're going to be miserable."
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Twenty books you should have read by now:
1. The Outsiders by William Thorndike.
2. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
3. Competitive Strategy by Michael Porter
4. The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence by Benoit Mandelbrot
5. Influence by Robert Cialdini
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IBM should use blockchain to track its vast accumulation of blockchain press releases.
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1/ Don Valentine (Sequoia founder):
"The art of storytelling is incredibly important. Learning to tell a story is critically important because that’s how the money works. The money flows as a function of the story.”
A venture capitalist get to see all kinds of storytellers.
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Jeff Bezos: "Those quarterly results were fully baked three years ago. Today I'm working on a quarter that will happen in 2020, not next quarter. Next quarter is done already and it's probably been done for a couple years."
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Charlie Munger is 95 years old today. He has said he is not be a role model for anyone (especially the way he always says exactly what he believes without much tact), but I have learned a lot from him. This was my attempt to reduce his ideas to 500 words.
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@garrytan
Fred Destin: “What I do know for sure is that this old Silicon Valley proverb is grounded in age-old wisdom that still applies today: Good boards don’t create good companies, but a bad board will kill a company every time.”
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When I think about writing that has had the greatest influence on my thinking, it is most often an essay. I love books but essays can be particularly powerful. The danger in listing just ten essays is that I will leave something important out. They are not listed in any order.
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Here we go. BRK 2022 Tweetstorm.
Buffett: "Berkshire is stronger than any bank. There's no reason for a Berkshire subsidiary to have a bank line."
Some Berkshire subsidiaries do have bank lines, but that's because the local bankers need something to do.
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1/ This is your periodic reminder that if you have not read these Charlie Munger speeches, you are a damn fool.
I have read these speech transcripts many times, both as a reminder of what I already should know and because I discover new ideas as I experience more of life.
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1/ Charlie Munger yesterday at the DJCO meeting: "You people come from all over the world to this meeting out of some deep hunger. I regard you as nerds because I was once one of you and I know a nerd when I see one."
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"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and a 60 Minutes interview to ruin it."
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1/ Graduating seniors deserve a Charlie Munger Tweetstorm with appropriate life advice to mark the occasion.
"I want you to learn as much as you can vicariously. It’s too painful to do it by personal hardship. “You don't have to pee on an electric fence to learn not to do it”
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My life is eventful in addition to COVID-19 related events. I've been reading and tweeting since 3AM since I'm passing kidney stone fragments. My mother passed due to complications of Parkinson's disease on Monday. I'm writing her obituary this week. A memorial service must wait.
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1/ People ask me about differences between now and the internet bubble since I was involved in the 1990s.
If you weren't there it may seem hard to believe, but there is relatively less FOMO now than there was 1999.
There is more money now with nowhere else to go than in 1999.
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If you're having stock market problems I feel bad for you son,
I got ninety nine problems but Oracle ain't one.
I ain't passed the CFA exam, but I know a little bit,
Enough that I won't buy stocks with prices that will continue to get hit.
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1/ QUICK: "What's the secret to a long and happy life."
MUNGER: "Don't have a lot of envy, don't have a lot of resentment, don't overspend your income and stay cheerful in spite of your troubles. Deal with reliable people and you do what you're supposed to do."
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Charlie Munger: "Part of the Berkshire secret is that when is there is nothing to do, Warren is very good at doing nothing." He said Buffett reads most of the time and talks on the phone sometimes. No change in behavior.
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Charlie Munger: "A great strategy in life is to specialize. No one wants to go see someone who is half proctologist and half dentist."
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A teacher asks a class a question: There are ten sheep in a pen. One jumps out, how many are left? Everyone but one boy said nine are left. That one boy said none are left. The teacher said you don’t understand arithmetic and he said: "You don’t understand sheep." Charlie Munger
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When Charlie Munger was 29 he went through a divorce that left him broke. A short time later he learned his son had leukemia. The 9 year old died a year later.
"Assume life will be really tough. Ask if you can handle it. If the answer is yes, you’ve won.”
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Only 2k people are listening to the Munger talk live. But it will be made available later on video.
Listen and generate a investing and life edge. Listeners are on mute but can submit questions after a 20 minute conversation.
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The best no paywall unfiltered Charlie Munger reading material from the past week:
Munger's Three Basic Rules Essay:
Becky Quick interview transcript:
Stripe will release a 3-hour chat between John Collison and Charlie Tuesday.
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1/ Charlie Munger's second tweetstorm, but this time for new business school graduates.
"We get these questions a lot from the enterprising young. It’s a very intelligent question: You look at some old guy who’s rich and you ask, ‘How can I become like you, except faster?’"
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Charlie Munger describes Disney as the equivalent of “an oil company that can put the oil back in the ground after it is done drilling so it can drill it again." Re-drillable intellectual property is the new oil for a business like Disney.
Less than five months after it launched, Disney Plus has 50 million subscribers
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1/ What might you want to take away from today's Berkshire meeting?
Focus on the way they think about the investing process. You are not them.
You have a different circle of competence and different resources, needs and goals.
How they think about investing is what matters.
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1/ Charlie Munger answers the Proust Questionaire (with edits by Tren):
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
"To help another human being know more."
Who is your hero?
Maimonides. All the philosophy and writing he did was after working 12 hours a day as a physician.
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New cryptocurrencies are expected tomorrow from Burroughs, DEC, Wang, Prime, Tandem, Silicon Graphics, Sun, Atari, Osborne, Commodore, Palm, WordPerfect, Lotus, Ashton, Tate, Borland, Informix,Sybase, BEA, Seibel, PowerSoft, Nortel, Banyan, Novell, Qwest, Myspace, and Ask Jeeves.
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A survey of 5,699 published authors, found that in 2022, their median gross pre-tax income from their books was $2,000.
You can generate more revenue than that in less time by mowing lawns in your neighborhood.
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Clayton Christiansen: "When I talked to Morris Chang, chairman of TSMC in Taiwan, he asked why Americans are so eager to get assets off their balance sheets. He was quite happy to put assets onto his balance sheet even though it costs about $10 billion to build a new factory."
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I have been know to say:
"If you haven't read these 45 free papers by Michael Mauboussin, what the heck have you been reading?"
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Before I wrote a book on the way Charlie Munger thinks I created a collection quotations which is available for free here.
My book on Charlie has a footnote and source for every quotation since the publisher was Columbia Business School Publishing.
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Gavin Baker:
"A GPU is half the size of an iPhone. It is made with three tablespoons of sand at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. Nvidia buys this from TSM for $700 and then sells it for $50,000."
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1/ Munger: "Amazon has more to fear from Costco than Costco has to fear from Amazon. Because [Costco has] a better warehouse situation that is much cheaper- plus a public that totally believes that anything they sell will be high quality and low price."
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@BillAckman
@joerogan
Why should should people listen to an expert on a topic debate with a conspiracy theorist with no expertise?
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Every year as summer vacation season starts I get asked what books I recommend. Some of the best books require a small effort to assemble. Not everyone is willing to do this work. Example: start with the first
@bgurley
post from 1996 and read them all:
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1/ Warren Buffett yesterday:
"The best results occur at companies that require minimal assets to conduct high-margin businesses – and offer goods or services that will expand their sales volume with only minor needs for additional capital."
Who are these businesses?
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1/ "Silicon Valley has Peaked" is a deeply broken conclusion. What has actually happened is that "Silicon Valley/SF is full from a housing standpoint" because of zoning policies preventing significant new construction. This makes other cities relatively more attractive.
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1/ Charlie Munger: "We invested money in China. I feel about Russia the way Gundlach feels about China. I don’t invest in Russia so I can’t criticize Gundlach’s point of view. I reached a different conclusion. If he’s nervous, he doesn’t have to join us."
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100 Pokecoins cost $0.99. Pokecoinn holders earn no interest, but that's better than Japanese 10-year debt which yields negative 0.29%.
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1/ The primary drivers of business models:
a. More revenue per customer
b. Lower customer acquisition cost (CAC)
c. Lower customer churn/higher customer retention
d. Higher gross margin
One layer down: secondary drivers (eg, engagement) positively impacting primary drivers.
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What Jeff Bezos is talking about here is the Babe Ruth Effect. . H/t Brattle Street
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Charlie Munger: "We finally realized that railroads now have a huge competitive advantage. Bill Gates figured this out years before us – he invested in a Canadian railroad and made eight hundred percent. Maybe Gates should manage Berkshire’s money."
Past 20 years, railroads outperformed $QQQ.
And that's not including dividends, which give a further boost. $UNP $CP $CNI $CSX
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1/ "Bill Gurley has written about the idea that owning demand is way more important than owning supply. I’ve really focused on is why [an aggregator] is different than a platform." Ben Thompson
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Whenever you read or hear the phrase "losing money" you should ask yourself: what does this person mean?
1. GAAP earnings?
2. Cash flow?
3. Unit economics?
The phrase is so unspecific that it should not be used unless money in physical form is lost.
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1/ Buffett thinks of cash as a call option with no expiration date, an option on every asset class, with no strike price. It's not a free option though.
"The worst investment you can have is cash. Cash is going to become worth less over time. Cash is a bad investment over time."
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What often happens is that a CEO chases one *input* metric and fails to understand that is *output* of all the unit economics variables that determines success. Big subscriber growth can destroy shareholder value if ARPU, CAC, Churn and COGS are wrong. It depends.
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1/ This tweetstorm is about “wholesale transfer pricing power,” a term I learned from John Malone in the 1990s. WTPP determines who in a value chain gets the biggest share of the profit pool (e.g., do content owners, cable owners or vendors to cable firms have the best WTPP?).
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1/ Young investors must walk uphill in deep snow to get to a work investing in markets every single day.
Charlie Munger: "We had idiot competition when we were young. Now we’ve got tough competition scrounging every area and little niche. It's way harder."
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1/ Volkswagen Chairman Herbert Dies says, “Software will account for 90% of future innovations in the car.”
..hardly a line of software code comes from us.” VW estimates that only 10% of the software in its vehicles is developed in-house.
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Someone asked me what is the most interesting part of my work. It is this;
"Microsoft’s Office is now a cloud-based service boasting more than 214 million subscribers who pay around $99 a year; it has more subscribers than Spotify and Amazon Prime combined."
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Four words of advice meme:
Stay in competence circle
Maintain margin of safety
Price is not value
The Market is bipolar
Buy bargains and wait
Be a learning machine
Use multiple diverse models
Favorable odds are essential
Be rational, avoid hubris
Avoid high transaction costs
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Three favorite blogs in VC? Gurley, Wilson, Suster. My three favorite podcasts in finance generally? Patrick O'Shaughnessy and Barry and the other Ritholtzians. Three favorite books? Competitive Strategy by Porter, Poor Charlie's Almanack and any book by Michael Mauboussin.
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1/ IBM’s OS/2 vs Microsoft's Windows was an important period in the history of PCs and computing. People who were not around then too often have a false view of what happened (e.g. MSFT head fake) and even people who were there can have different recollections (Rashomon effects).
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1/ Charlie Munger: "I have a simple rule for success in fishing. Fish where the fish are. If the fishing is really lousy where you are you should probably look for another place to fish."
When I see people use modern data science tools, I think about this point made by Charlie.
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What's your opportunity cost of not listening to this John Malone interview? What exactly is your second best opportunity? Be specific.
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1/ Bill Gurley became a Benchmark partner in 1999. That same year Craig McCaw asked me to spend time in their Sand Hill Road office so we could more easily make early stage investments together. Having the opportunity observe Benchmark's DNA up close was a fantastic way to learn.
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1/ "Paul knew a lot more than I did about computer hardware, the machines themselves. One summer day in 1972, when I was sixteen and Paul was nineteen, he showed me a ten‑paragraph article buried on page 143 of Electronics magazine."
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1/ The microeconomics of a software as a service (SaaS) business evolved from cable and mobile. John Malone invented what is the most common business model for SaaS.
"It’s not about earnings, it’s about wealth creation and levered cash-flow growth."
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"A 60-year-old startup founder is 3 times as likely to found a successful startup as a 30-year-old startup founder--and is 1.7 times as likely to found a startup that winds up in the top 0.1 percent of all companies."
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1/ This thread is about "AMP IT UP" by Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman. It is a readable no-nonsense book written by a proven business operator. It won't take you long to read it. The book is modern in its format. It doesn't waste your time with a lot of fluff. Less is more.
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Have you read this essay by Michael Mauboussin on total addressable market? If not, why not? Do you have a reasonable excuse?
Have truer words ever been written about business? If so, when?
"TAM is an area where overconfidence and optimism are rife."
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Another Griffin family secret is how to process and deal with the death of someone you love. I've lost track of how many people have told me: "Your father helped us so much when [ ] passed away." He was a doctor and a giant in my life. He passed away very early today. He was 94
My 93 year old father just gave me permission to reveal a Griffin family secret:
You create incredible value without any monetary cost, fiat or otherwise, by being kind to people, being trustworthy, showing up for causes you believe in and standing up for what's right.
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Tip for young people: when a significant recession happens, which is different than a stock market correction, you won't see people talking so much about "earnings." They will instead become focused on cash and cash flow. Cash will be king like you have never seen before. 👑
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1/ Peter Bevelin, who has written books like “Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger,” provided me with a rough transcript of the Charlie Munger talk from yesterday. I did some clean up and editing and focus on points I didn’t make in my tweets yesterday.
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This is straight up theft. It's not complex. Saying this was "rounding error" isn't an excuse for stealing.
Michael Lewis: "How do you not know that $8 billion that's not yours is in your private fund?"
Michael Lewis is in psychological denial.
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1/ "Every human being is going to be able to build an audience without any gatekeepers. The next step: deep unbundling of the storefront and the marketplace, which means people will be able to sell things on their own accord."
Few understand this. Really.
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When LTCM was in trouble professional sharks appeared on the other side of trades: "smelling the blood in the water” they pressed trades against LTCM. When the forensics are done on GME, professional shark bites will be found. This isn't all retail.
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A friend of mine said to me recently that he knew exactly how much cash his businesses generated but that he has no idea what his earnings are until his accountants tell him. Another said his dad felt the same way about his car dealership. Cash is a fact. Earnings are an opinion.
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1/ "If the price of a painting goes from $250 to $50 million in one hundred years, what's the annual rate of return? Buffett's answer was instantaneous: '13.0 percent.' The astonished Stavrou asked, "How did you do that?"
Robert Hagstrom writes in
"The Warren Buffett Portfolio"
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1/ Buffett: "We learned a long time ago that you can't make a good deal with a bad person. Just forget it. Now, if you think you can draw up a contract that, that is going to work against a bad person, they're gonna win. They probably enjoy litigation."
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This podcast with John Malone is self-recommending. He describes Bill Gates arriving for a meeting with a pizza and a beer 6-pack telling him to "Forget hardware since there's nothing in hardware that can't be emulated in software." Malone: "Damn, I should have listened to him."
You don’t have to wait until
#LibertyInvestorDay
to hear the latest from
#JohnMalone
on
@KindredCast
with
#AryehBourkoff
. Insights on media trends, career learnings and hard v. digital currencies before his upcoming 80th birthday.
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Warren Buffett: "I would like to be remembered as a teacher." He would be pleased to have that on his tombstone." Charlie Munger has said on that: "The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.”
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@businessbarista
In July 1981 Microsoft purchased all rights to 86-DOS from SCP for US$50,000.
In 1987 Microsoft paid $14 million for Forethought/PowerPoint.
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Here's an easy example. You see a great aunt. She is struggling. Her life has been hard. Whatever she is wearing you say: "Wow! That's a fabulous outfit. You look great!"
You just printed happiness at zero cost to you. If you don't make the effort to be kind, you're a damn fool.
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I hope that my Tweetstorm in some small way made your life better or easier. For example, I hope I freed up your time for more important things like raising children, taking care of parents, gardening, fishing or digging clams.
Your friend, Tren
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1/ Aswath Damodaran:
"I do not have much faith in accountancy and I think book value has completely lost its meaning. What does the book value of Google capture? Your biggest assets are off the books."
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My Tweetstorm on how Malone invented the SaaS business model will appear in serial format over the weekend. It is intended to be an antidote against people who don't understand when the model works and when it doesn't. The antidote works against both promoters and detractors.
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My sister suggested that I acquire this ornament for my tree:
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Grantham's has predicted 11 of the last two corrections. That's how you get elite status on Markets Insider.
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I've never felt more strongly that I won the ovarian lottery than this past week.
An Amazon delivery driver asked: "What job should I get to be able to afford a house like yours." My answer was: "I was lucky in many ways. Don't rely that. Own a business."
Lucky Man and The Sea.
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A 20 year old man visits Mozart: "I want to compose symphonies.”
Mozart: "You’re too young to compose symphonies.”
Young Man: "But you were composing symphonies when you were 10 years old.”
Mozart: "Yes, but I wasn’t running around asking other people how to do it.” CM
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31/ Buffett: "The best businesses don't require a lot of capital. If you can find a business that doesn't require capital when it grows, you really have something valuable. That attribute is certainly not the railroad or energy business - both are still attractive businesses."
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1/ "No one calls Excel a no-code tool, but it is one of the most underappreciated programming environments in the world. The number of Excel programmers versus people using what we think of as more traditional languages is really something to behold."
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This is a paper document about Microsoft that I keep in a device called a filing cabinet:
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My friend and I wrote a book about negotiations in places like Japan that is a collection of mostly personal experiences. We bought back the copyright so our cheap friends can read it free
Below is a negotiation story from Morris Chang.
H/T Dylan Patel
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1/ Investments in PPE (property, plant and equipment) appearing on balance sheets no longer drive profits as much as they once did. Businesses invest more in intangible assets like software that are expensed, which lowers GAAP "earnings." Determining what creates value is hard.
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40/ Buffett: "IQ doesn't necessarily correlate with wisdom. I know people who don't have high IQ, but are wise. Graham is one of the three smartest people I have known." He refused to name the others so as to not disappoint anyone.
To close: "Never bet against America!"
Wrap!
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Someone asked me a history question about Microsoft tonight and I dug out this paper fact sheet from my files to give them an answer.
My first conversation with Bill about Microsoft was in the summer of 1980.
Microsoft sales in 1980 were $8 million. 40 employees at year end.
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Anyone who doesn't believe Charlie Munger should decide when and how the US economy re-opens instead of a committee of any kind is a damn fool. Don't @ me on this. You know it is true.
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Michael Moritz: "You could have put a chimpanzee in Silicon Valley in 1986 and it would have been successful in the venture business."
It's good to have a tailwind.
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1/ Why Benchmark will "only" raise $425M for the next fund is the same reason why Bill Gurley uses the words "rewarding life" instead of "maximize wealth" in the title of the talk he gave at the University of Texas. Everything starts with what makes the general partners happy.
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1/ Warren Buffett:
“Interest rates are to asset prices what gravity is to the apple. When there are low interest rates, there is a very low gravitational pull on asset prices.”
“The most important item over time in valuation is obviously interest rates."
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