Mario Cibelli - Cornerstone Investing Insights - [Invest Like the Best, EP.205]

My guest today is Mario Cibelli. Mario is the managing partner of Marathon Partners Equity Management, a long-biased, concentrated investment firm that he's run for over 20 years. In our conversation, we discuss how his firm figured out Blockbuster's DVD volume and told Reed Hastings and Netflix about their numbers, why visiting a company's distribution center can be an edge for investors, Mario's interesting foray into the world of tequila, and how a few "cornerstone" investing insights have led to many of Marathon's long positions. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Mario. This episode of Invest like the Best 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 Square, Snowflake, or almost any company of interest. All you have to do is log in. Visit https://www.tegus.co/patrick to learn more. For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club and new email newsletter called “Inside the Episode” at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag Show Notes (2:34) – (First question) – Doing a deep dive into the early days of Netflix (2:43) – Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs (6:50) – What was impressive about Reed (7:34) – Visiting Netflix’s distribution centers early on and the lessons of those visits (10:44) – Lessons learned from other distribution centers (17:52) – What helps create good luck for a company (19:17) – Why tequila was fun to investigate (25:09) – Why tequila is different from other hard liquors (27:40) – Finding the cornerstone insight in a company (29:20) – What he’s learned about media-driven personalities and WWE (34:30) – Lessons in starting a media company and developing IP (39:00) – Having to battle activist shareholders in business (42:43) – How the rate of return in deep investigations has changed over his time (45:08) – Kindest thing anyone has done for him Learn More For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club and new email newsletter called “Inside the Episode” at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag