Lessons from Leaders

It's always Day 1.

Great leaders build legacies. They create successful and enduring businesses and continue to make impacts even after retiring. Thus, I always return to their wisdom to find the ingredients that make enduring businesses (that last centuries).

I hope some of these examples will help your investment process too.

Jeff Bezos @JeffBezos

• It is always Day 1

  There are many ways to center a business (competitor-focused, product-focused, or technology-focused). In my view, obsessive customer focus is the most protective of Day 1 vitality. Why? Customers are always beautiful, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples. Staying Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. - 2016 Shareholder Letter

  

• What’s Day 2?

  Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by an excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.

• Customer value = shareholder value

• Share scaled economies

• Customer value = shareholder value

• It's All About the Long Term

• A Dreamy Business Offering

• FCF Per Share

• Focus on quality - Charlie Munger

“You can identify certain business momentums in the real world that aren’t necessarily in the financials and allow for sustained returns on capital

Munger spent no time focusing on the balance sheet, income statement, or earnings multiples. Rather, he spoke almost exclusively about qualitative factors, such as economies of scale, universal appeal, and a strong brand that helped turn Coca-Cola into the world’s most dominant beverage company.

• Fat pitch - Email conversation between Warren Buffett and Jeff Raikes (MSFT)

I’ll add more resources as I go, so do share with your friends, subscribe & check back :)