John Harris - Resilience and Imagination - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 230]

My guest today is John Harris, Managing Partner of Ruane, Cunniff & Goldfarb, where the flagship Sequoia Fund has an incredible 50-year track record running a highly concentrated portfolio of equities. In our conversation, we cover John’s approach to finding businesses that can be owned for the long-term, what goes into their diligence process, and the importance of resilience for investors. I think many of the stock pickers will enjoy many of the points on good management, good businesses, and using imagination. I hope you enjoy my conversation with John. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here. ------ This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus has built the most extensive primary information platform available for investors. With Tegus, you can learn everything you’d want to know about a company in an on-demand digital platform. Investors share their expert calls, allowing others to instantly access more than 10,000 calls on Affirm, Teladoc, Roblox, or almost any company of interest. All you have to do is log in. Visit tegus.co/patrick to learn more. ------ This episode is brought to you by Paxos. Paxos offers your customers crypto buying, selling, transferring, and more with easy to integrate APIs. Whether you’re a small fintech or a large financial institution, Paxos takes care of everything in the backend – from licensing and compliance to custody and exchange. You can start offering crypto to your customers within months. To learn more, visit paxos.com/patrick. ------ Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, Inc. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes [00:03:48] - [First question] - How markets undervalue long-duration growth of companies [00:07:21] - Why should one even do DCFs at all [00:10:01] - Defining homework when studying a business and what getting better as you do your homework tends to look like [00:12:24] - How the market still underestimates how the quality of a company reduces risk [00:15:09] - Reinvestment opportunity and risk and why they’re important for long term returns [00:17:14] - Lessons learned owning Google stock options for over a decade [00:22:02] - Skill versus luck when it comes to investing psychology [00:24:32] - Perspectives on big market cap companies in a portfolio when success often comes from smaller-cap non-linear growth [00:26:47] - Features of the current market landscape that he finds interesting [00:31:24] - What buying behavior looks like in the demand side of the business equation [00:34:10] - Discovering a company that served the customer and was a delight to discover [00:37:58] - Analysing getting one's hands dirty to get a competitive advantage in serving the customer [00:39:24] - The hardest episode of his investing career and what he learned from it [00:43:03] - Reasons why a company succeeded after doing a deep dive but not buying in [00:43:54] - One of the CEOs he finds most remarkable [00:47:20] - Examples of businesses where scale isn’t the driver of competitive advantage [00:49:50] - A company they owned that did well but didn’t have the strongest company culture [00:50:56] - His view on the investment industry today writ large [00:52:16] - Ways investors could expand their imagination when analyzing businesses [00:53:07] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him