Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339]

My guest today is Samo Burja. Samo is the founder of consulting firm, Bismark Analysis, and has dedicated his life’s work to understanding why there has never been an immortal society. His research focuses on institutions, the founders behind them, how they rise and why they always fall in the end. As you’ll hear, Samo has an encyclopedic grasp of history and his work has led him to some fascinating theories about human progress, the nature of exceptional founders, and the future of different societies across the world. Please enjoy my conversation with Samo Burja. Listen to Founders Podcast Founders Episode 311: James Cameron For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus is the modern research platform for leading investors. Tired of running your own expert calls to get up to speed on a company? Tegus lets you ramp faster and find answers to critical questions more efficiently than any alternative method. The gold standard for research, the Tegus platform delivers unmatched access to timely, qualitative insights through the largest and most differentiated expert call transcript database. With over 60,000 transcripts spanning 22,000 public and private companies, investors can accelerate their fundamental research process by discovering highly-differentiated and reliable insights that can’t be found anywhere else in the market. As a listener, drive your next investment thesis forward with Tegus for free at tegus.co/patrick. ----- Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more. 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 (00:02:52) - (First question) - The core thesis behind the Great Founder Theory (00:06:40) - Great ideas inevitably being discovered at some point in history (00:08:45) - The historic implications of a global adoption of the Great Founder Theory (00:10:51) - The different possible directions of future trends (00:17:08) - Distinctions between great founders versus live players (00:22:15) - Common misconceptions about what qualifies one as a great founder (00:24:38) - Noteworthy great founders in the United States (00:28:34) - Recurring observable traits and common themes of great founders (00:31:29) - Using caution when projecting a mythic lens onto great founders (00:37:53) - Social technology as the upstream effects of prior material technology (00:43:32) - Whether or not institutions play a role in propagating the work of great founders (00:49:08) - The role of power and differences between owned and borrowed power (00:56:51) - Additional ideas that play an outsized role in shaping the world (01:01:09) - A differing worldview to his own that he finds interesting (01:04:53) - Whether or not capital allocators can benefit from the Great Founder Theory (01:07:37) - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him