Learn from the legends in their own words, then go write your own story @firesidealpha for market signal
Joined June 2026
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In 2007, a rival fund called Ken Griffin on a Sunday needing to dump a $30 billion book before Monday's open to meet margin calls. The senior banker on the competing bid went to bed.
Citadel owned all of it by 6AM.
This is him telling the whole story -- the 50-person team assembled in hours, the all-nighter, and the banker on the competing bid who called from Greenwich to say he was going to bed:
"And he said, look, it's getting late, this isn't gonna get done tonight. I'm heading off to bed, I'm telling my guys to go home, and we'll pick this up in the morning."
"And I said, there will be nothing to pick up in the morning. We're going to get this done. he sort of laughed and hung up."
"6AM before the opening of the markets, we bought that entire portfolio."
The quote he lands it on, from President Lincoln:
"Things may come to those who wait, but only those things left by those who hustle."
Bookmark & watch ↓
Jensen Huang founded Nvidia on the wrong graphics technology, and when no one knew the right way, he bought three textbooks from Fry's for a couple hundred dollars to rebuild the algorithm. Nvidia is worth more than $4 trillion today.
This is him at Y Combinator on the day he realized Nvidia was building the wrong thing:
Nvidia had chosen the wrong graphics approach, finished dead last, and run out of money. Then came the worse discovery. "Not only did we choose the wrong technology, we didn't know how to do it the right way." He said it to the whole company out loud, because the alternative was pretending it wasn't true.
"We won't have a company if we don't confront the fact that this doesn't work and start working towards the right algorithm."
There was no research budget and no expert to call, so he went and found the answer himself.
"I had a couple hundred dollars in my pocket. And so I went down to Fry's and I bought three textbooks. And the textbooks were about OpenGL and how to design OpenGL pipelines. I brought it back to the company and gave it to the engineers."
The engineers rebuilt the whole thing from those pages, and it became the foundation for everything Nvidia made after.
"Everybody would have thought that Nvidia started out as world leaders in 3D graphics. And we learned it from a textbook."
Decades later, he still tells it as a punchline against himself. "We actually started the company, raised money, and bought textbooks, when you think about it."
Bookmark & watch ↓
$SPCX Starlink looks to be driving customer acquisition gains for United Airlines
“We already see customers moving from other airlines today.”
United Airlines CEO reveals Starlink is already pulling travelers from rival airlines--with status-match applications running 4x normal and 25% obtaining or seeking a United credit card
SCOTT KIRBY (CEO): “We’re planning for higher oil—or higher jet-fuel prices—and higher industry capacity next year.
“We’re doing reasonably well even in this environment, and we have a big tailwind coming next year, too, with Starlink.
“You flew last night and didn’t have it, and you can tell how different it is without it.
“We’re going to cross the 50% threshold this week—50% of flights with Starlink. By the end of next year, we’ll finish Starlink.
“We already see customers moving from other airlines today.”
LeBeau: “Put some numbers on how many customers have moved over to you because you believe Starlink has convinced them this is the place to go.”
KIRBY: “It’s mostly anecdotal today with some numbers though, but the status-match program we did had about four times the normal number of status-match applications.
“What’s amazing is that a quarter of those customers either already have or have applied for the United credit card, which is also an indication of their intent to stay at United.
“One thing that makes United unique is that we operate in the most contested markets. Our hubs are in the most contested markets in the country—places like Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.
“There are more customers up for grabs. There are more splitters—people in those places who fly multiple airlines—and what we’re finding is that they’re moving exclusively to United.”
David Einhorn explains why the value investing industry has been defeated, and walks through how it leaves Greenlight as a "dinosaur"
“The market structure has changed, and there has been what I consider to be a broken market, or the value investing industry, I think, is defeated, so to speak."
"It used to be that most money was invested by these long-only investors, these big mutual funds and stuff like that."
"And they had money coming in every day, and they were getting nice fees on all of that money, and they had large research teams, and they would sit around following all of the companies with teams of analysts and they would say this company we think is undervalued by 30% and it might be a growth stock or a value stock or Magnificent Seven or otherwise, but they would say I think this is undervalued by 30% and if I buy it and I hold it I’ll make the S&P plus 30."
"Now as we’ve moved to passive they’ve lost their customers and the remaining customers are paying them lower fees and they have reduced their research staffs and they don’t have new money coming in to make new investments in any case."
"But the market is now dominated by passives, index funds, which buy what everyone else has already decided things are worth, or algorithms, which are basically trying to figure out what is everybody else doing and how do I front run that, or retail, which is buying things because they think it’s cool or they think it’s going up."
"And so most of the investing these days is no longer done by people who are buying something because they think it’s worth more. They have opinions about price, like what is the price going to be tomorrow. And so the result is most trading that is going on right now has nothing to do with value."
"So it leaves us sort of as a dinosaur. We’re one of the remaining few people left who are looking at things on a traditional basis.”
Dan Sundheim explains why real risk management has to happen before the trade, not after
“Yeah, you could follow Reddit tweets all day long, but what does that tell me? The stock went up 100%. There’s a bunch of people who like the stock. Obviously, if I read the Reddit, they like the stock."
"It went up 100%. There’s no information signal there. I know that people are buying the stock. I know that they’re buying the stock for a reason that I think is kind of silly."
"And the most important thing to me is that we just have to be able to ride it out. So whatever happens, risk management cannot happen after the fact."
"Anything you do after the fact is not risk management. It’s actually just destroying capital. Risk management has to happen before the fact, meaning you size these positions so that when it goes up you don’t have to cover."
"Anyone who says, ‘Oh, I risk-manage the portfolio because things were going against me’ -- if you’re a bad stock picker, sure. If you’re any good at stock picking, risk management after the fact is a bad idea."
"So we now size things... All I can do is size a position such that if they get excited and the stock goes crazy, we don’t have to cover it. We just kind of let it go and ride it through.”
Dan Sundheim explains why real risk management has to happen before the trade, not after
“Yeah, you could follow Reddit tweets all day long, but what does that tell me? The stock went up 100%. There’s a bunch of people who like the stock. Obviously, if I read the Reddit, they like the stock."
"It went up 100%. There’s no information signal there. I know that people are buying the stock. I know that they’re buying the stock for a reason that I think is kind of silly."
"And the most important thing to me is that we just have to be able to ride it out. So whatever happens, risk management cannot happen after the fact."
"Anything you do after the fact is not risk management. It’s actually just destroying capital. Risk management has to happen before the fact, meaning you size these positions so that when it goes up you don’t have to cover."
"Anyone who says, ‘Oh, I risk-manage the portfolio because things were going against me’ -- if you’re a bad stock picker, sure. If you’re any good at stock picking, risk management after the fact is a bad idea."
"So we now size things... All I can do is size a position such that if they get excited and the stock goes crazy, we don’t have to cover it. We just kind of let it go and ride it through.”
The more the crowd gambles on stocks, the better it is for a patient short. Dan Sundheim on short-side asymmetry, excess volatility, and playing a different game
Dan Sundheim of D1 Capital explains:
“Certainly retail creates a lot more short-term volatility, which is generally fine with me. But on the short side, if there’s a lot of volatility, shorts are different than longs."
"Longs go down, your capital goes down, but the position sizes get smaller. But shorts go against you, leverage goes up, and position sizes get bigger."
"And so from a risk management standpoint, anybody who’s transacting in the market with a completely different strategy than I’m running should be good for me."
"Because if I’m playing football and you’re playing basketball, it’s fine. I can play my game, you play your game. And your game should give me opportunities."
"If people are gambling on stocks and not paying attention to long-term fundamentals, that should be good. But the gambling creates really excess volatility you just have to be aware of and be careful of, especially on the short side.”
The more the crowd gambles on stocks, the better it is for a patient short. Dan Sundheim on short-side asymmetry, excess volatility, and playing a different game
Dan Sundheim of D1 Capital explains:
“Certainly retail creates a lot more short-term volatility, which is generally fine with me. But on the short side, if there’s a lot of volatility, shorts are different than longs."
"Longs go down, your capital goes down, but the position sizes get smaller. But shorts go against you, leverage goes up, and position sizes get bigger."
"And so from a risk management standpoint, anybody who’s transacting in the market with a completely different strategy than I’m running should be good for me."
"Because if I’m playing football and you’re playing basketball, it’s fine. I can play my game, you play your game. And your game should give me opportunities."
"If people are gambling on stocks and not paying attention to long-term fundamentals, that should be good. But the gambling creates really excess volatility you just have to be aware of and be careful of, especially on the short side.”
Marshall Wace's Paul Marshall explains how AI turned his fundamental teams into agentic portfolio managers
“Although AI we think is going to be totally transformational of our TOPS system, the biggest change today has been on our fundamental side, where it’s been completely revolutionary.”
“Because of the infrastructure we have, we’ve been able to apply it immediately to the way we do fundamental investing, and everything to do with distillation of information to start with. And so multiple, varied tools to distill information for our managers, so that we absorb all information very rapidly overnight and they have it at their fingertips.”
“But then also we’ve moved to the point where we already have agentic portfolio managers, developed by our fundamental teams, by transforming their skills into a portfolio system. And all of that is before we go to recursive self-improvement.”
“So our head of tech thinks that we’re going to go from 200 quant researchers to 10,000 quant researchers, by which he means we’ll have 10,000 agents, and they’ll be recursively analyzing all of the data, improving and developing new ways of implementing the signals into live portfolios.”
Fireside Tapes retweeted
SurgoCap's Mala Gaonkar explains how she actually defines a moat
“So when I say moat, what do I mean by that? I mean a business that has very high incremental ROICs, because ultimately the value of a business is going to be the return on incremental invested capital times the dollars you can put to work at those incremental returns, right?”
“So it’s a balance of what is driving that ROIC, and multiple ways are really the best ways, right? So if it’s just by driving up price, I don’t love that. But if it’s driving up price and there’s feature innovation and there’s market growth through new geographies or new products, that’s great. So multiple levers on driving ROIC is one.”
“The second is the capital you can put to work at those incremental returns. There are many businesses that have, you know, not many, but there’s some great business that have high incremental returns, but the capital they can put to work at those incremental returns are diminishing. The growth market isn’t there.”
“And so trying to understand what category of business that is, and then even if they do have a lot of capital they can put to work, and we’re seeing this in the technology space today.”
“Execution risk is enormous.”
In 2000, before Google was Google, Satya Nadella saw the search business coming, and he gave up on it. The ad business inside Google Search now brings in more than $200 billion a year.
This is Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, confessing a call he saw clearly and did not fight for.
The idea, a product called Keywords, belonged to Ali Partovi, a young founder on Satya's team who would not stop pushing it. Satya came around.
"You saw it clearly, and through your evangelism of that I saw it."
Seeing it was never the problem.
The money was already in banner ads, and switching to a keyword auction meant a short-term revenue drop and a fight across teams.
As the senior person in the room he could have forced it, and he didn't.
"But I gave up. And that bugs me. I regret that a lot."
He does not shrink the cost to Microsoft.
"The entire arc of Microsoft's thing was we won the browser war only to lose the web."
The rule he took from it is about who carries the danger when a call is risky and right.
"When you're at the top in particular, the one way you have to create room is by taking risk on your back."
A quarter century on, the engine he walked away from is one of the most profitable businesses ever built. The lesson is not really about search, it is about finding the courage not to let go of what you see clearly.
Bookmark & watch ↓
Marshall Wace's Paul Marshall explains how AI turned his fundamental teams into agentic portfolio managers
“Although AI we think is going to be totally transformational of our TOPS system, the biggest change today has been on our fundamental side, where it’s been completely revolutionary.”
“Because of the infrastructure we have, we’ve been able to apply it immediately to the way we do fundamental investing, and everything to do with distillation of information to start with. And so multiple, varied tools to distill information for our managers, so that we absorb all information very rapidly overnight and they have it at their fingertips.”
“But then also we’ve moved to the point where we already have agentic portfolio managers, developed by our fundamental teams, by transforming their skills into a portfolio system. And all of that is before we go to recursive self-improvement.”
“So our head of tech thinks that we’re going to go from 200 quant researchers to 10,000 quant researchers, by which he means we’ll have 10,000 agents, and they’ll be recursively analyzing all of the data, improving and developing new ways of implementing the signals into live portfolios.”
Dmitry Balyasny explains what separates a great analyst from a great PM
“Yeah, good question. So what makes a great analyst, and I think this is similar to a great PM, is you have to be able to think differently, right? You have to come up with unique, you know, variant ideas, differing views on things that lots of other people are constantly looking at, right?"
"And you might not have a differing view necessarily for the next five years, but you should be able to come up with a consistent flow of differing views for the next few months, maybe the next year, maybe the next couple of years in some cases."
"So that takes a particular type of wiring where you’re kind of constantly looking at like the other side of the coin and what might cause people to come around to your view and then digging on that.”
“So the balance of creativity and investment process discipline is common for both analysts and you need that for PMs as well. So a lot of times people that are really creative and come up with brilliant ideas don’t have process discipline. And they might fall in love with one particular idea. They have a hard time kind of running models on 100 different companies, right? Like you need kind of both things. So that is in common.”
“I think the thing that’s different is at a PM level, you certainly need more risk tolerance, right, where you’re comfortable with volatility. And some of that is innate and some of it can be learned. Right. You need the ability to juggle lots of different balls, right?”
“As an analyst, the great thing about being an analyst is you can go super deep on a particular thing and not worry about anything else for some period of time."
"If it’s a big enough idea you can raise your hand, talk to your PM and say listen, I think we should spend whatever, the next week, I’m just going to work on this. Right? And if you agree that this is like a big potential thing, like, I’m going to spend 90% of my time digging on this until we either prove or disprove this thesis, because I think this could be a really big bet, right?"
"As a PM, like, you don’t have that luxury, right? Like every day, there’s something blowing up in your book, hopefully, there’s something going well. You know, there’s a macro problem, somebody tweeted something, you know, there’s constantly 50 different things that you’re juggling."
"And so the ability to do deep work and dig in on something but also to zoom out and look at the overall portfolio and constantly, you know, balance those things, that’s like a unique, you know, PM skill.”
Fireside Tapes retweeted
Dmitry Balyasny explains what separates a great analyst from a great PM
“Yeah, good question. So what makes a great analyst, and I think this is similar to a great PM, is you have to be able to think differently, right? You have to come up with unique, you know, variant ideas, differing views on things that lots of other people are constantly looking at, right?"
"And you might not have a differing view necessarily for the next five years, but you should be able to come up with a consistent flow of differing views for the next few months, maybe the next year, maybe the next couple of years in some cases."
"So that takes a particular type of wiring where you’re kind of constantly looking at like the other side of the coin and what might cause people to come around to your view and then digging on that.”
“So the balance of creativity and investment process discipline is common for both analysts and you need that for PMs as well. So a lot of times people that are really creative and come up with brilliant ideas don’t have process discipline. And they might fall in love with one particular idea. They have a hard time kind of running models on 100 different companies, right? Like you need kind of both things. So that is in common.”
“I think the thing that’s different is at a PM level, you certainly need more risk tolerance, right, where you’re comfortable with volatility. And some of that is innate and some of it can be learned. Right. You need the ability to juggle lots of different balls, right?”
“As an analyst, the great thing about being an analyst is you can go super deep on a particular thing and not worry about anything else for some period of time."
"If it’s a big enough idea you can raise your hand, talk to your PM and say listen, I think we should spend whatever, the next week, I’m just going to work on this. Right? And if you agree that this is like a big potential thing, like, I’m going to spend 90% of my time digging on this until we either prove or disprove this thesis, because I think this could be a really big bet, right?"
"As a PM, like, you don’t have that luxury, right? Like every day, there’s something blowing up in your book, hopefully, there’s something going well. You know, there’s a macro problem, somebody tweeted something, you know, there’s constantly 50 different things that you’re juggling."
"And so the ability to do deep work and dig in on something but also to zoom out and look at the overall portfolio and constantly, you know, balance those things, that’s like a unique, you know, PM skill.”
Himalaya Capital’s Li Lu explains why all intelligent investing is value investing
“First of all, the value principle, put it this way, I think all investment, all intelligent investment is value investment. Because you always want to really get a little bit more than what you pay for. You know, what you pay is a price, what you get is value.”
“Whatever value that you can express yourself, whether that is in the business that is stagnant, or even declining but pay you a whole bunch of money back, or is the money of the company that rapidly growing or a bet that only have a small percentage of winning and a large percent of losing, therefore you’re spread. All of that come down to your understanding of where the value will be created because on the basic principle, they’re basically all discounted the future cash flow to the extent you can understand, estimate, accurately estimated. And so they’re all coming down to the same mathematical.”
“And so that’s why I said almost all intelligent investing is value investing. The basic principle doesn’t change. It can apply differently based on where I would go back to the concept that Warren articulated so well about circle of competence. Depends on where your circle of competence is.”
Dmitry Balyasny explains what separates a great analyst from a great PM
“Yeah, good question. So what makes a great analyst, and I think this is similar to a great PM, is you have to be able to think differently, right? You have to come up with unique, you know, variant ideas, differing views on things that lots of other people are constantly looking at, right?"
"And you might not have a differing view necessarily for the next five years, but you should be able to come up with a consistent flow of differing views for the next few months, maybe the next year, maybe the next couple of years in some cases."
"So that takes a particular type of wiring where you’re kind of constantly looking at like the other side of the coin and what might cause people to come around to your view and then digging on that.”
“So the balance of creativity and investment process discipline is common for both analysts and you need that for PMs as well. So a lot of times people that are really creative and come up with brilliant ideas don’t have process discipline. And they might fall in love with one particular idea. They have a hard time kind of running models on 100 different companies, right? Like you need kind of both things. So that is in common.”
“I think the thing that’s different is at a PM level, you certainly need more risk tolerance, right, where you’re comfortable with volatility. And some of that is innate and some of it can be learned. Right. You need the ability to juggle lots of different balls, right?”
“As an analyst, the great thing about being an analyst is you can go super deep on a particular thing and not worry about anything else for some period of time."
"If it’s a big enough idea you can raise your hand, talk to your PM and say listen, I think we should spend whatever, the next week, I’m just going to work on this. Right? And if you agree that this is like a big potential thing, like, I’m going to spend 90% of my time digging on this until we either prove or disprove this thesis, because I think this could be a really big bet, right?"
"As a PM, like, you don’t have that luxury, right? Like every day, there’s something blowing up in your book, hopefully, there’s something going well. You know, there’s a macro problem, somebody tweeted something, you know, there’s constantly 50 different things that you’re juggling."
"And so the ability to do deep work and dig in on something but also to zoom out and look at the overall portfolio and constantly, you know, balance those things, that’s like a unique, you know, PM skill.”
Himalaya Capital’s Li Lu explains why all intelligent investing is value investing
“First of all, the value principle, put it this way, I think all investment, all intelligent investment is value investment. Because you always want to really get a little bit more than what you pay for. You know, what you pay is a price, what you get is value.”
“Whatever value that you can express yourself, whether that is in the business that is stagnant, or even declining but pay you a whole bunch of money back, or is the money of the company that rapidly growing or a bet that only have a small percentage of winning and a large percent of losing, therefore you’re spread. All of that come down to your understanding of where the value will be created because on the basic principle, they’re basically all discounted the future cash flow to the extent you can understand, estimate, accurately estimated. And so they’re all coming down to the same mathematical.”
“And so that’s why I said almost all intelligent investing is value investing. The basic principle doesn’t change. It can apply differently based on where I would go back to the concept that Warren articulated so well about circle of competence. Depends on where your circle of competence is.”
Fireside Tapes retweeted
Gavin Baker explains the lessons he learned from Fidelity’s legends, from “panic early or double down late” to “numbers and excuses”
“I deeply admire my friend Antonio Gracias, who runs Valor Equity Partners. I think he’s done unique things and has unique lens that he sees the world through."
"There are great portfolio managers at Fidelity, a woman named Jennifer Uhrig, who she runs a venture fund now. But she at one point, she ran $70 billion, great numbers, to my knowledge, has run more money than any woman in history. And just, you know, she had so many great, you know, pieces of wisdom that have stuck with me. You either have to panic early or double down late and there’s anything in between you get killed and you have to know which one you are and be disciplined about it.”
“My friend, Steve Wymer, who runs a $200 billion fund with absolutely incredible numbers at Fidelity. You know, he really taught me the value of not only hard work, but doing the work yourself. And also just a phrase that, you know, Wymer always had was, there’s only two things in investing. There are numbers and there are excuses. And if you don’t have the first, nobody gives a shit about the second.”
“And then the aforementioned Will Danoff. You know, Will is incredible, because Will asks sometimes what seem like very basic questions but they’re very profound and being asked them, I think maybe sometimes forces the companies to think differently. And he also has this incredible ability to, I would call it play in the present and be completely dispassionate. And I’m not a golfer playing the present just means you can’t let your last bad shot, you know, hurt you, but investing is the same thing. You got to play in the present, you know, whether you’re on a string of hits or a string of misses.”
“And, you know, so I feel like I’ve learned something from, you know, a lot of people. I mean, I’ve certainly, you know, learned a lot from some of your former partners at Benchmark. Yeah, I think it has taken a village to make me the investor that I am.”
SurgoCap's Mala Gaonkar explains how she actually defines a moat
“So when I say moat, what do I mean by that? I mean a business that has very high incremental ROICs, because ultimately the value of a business is going to be the return on incremental invested capital times the dollars you can put to work at those incremental returns, right?”
“So it’s a balance of what is driving that ROIC, and multiple ways are really the best ways, right? So if it’s just by driving up price, I don’t love that. But if it’s driving up price and there’s feature innovation and there’s market growth through new geographies or new products, that’s great. So multiple levers on driving ROIC is one.”
“The second is the capital you can put to work at those incremental returns. There are many businesses that have, you know, not many, but there’s some great business that have high incremental returns, but the capital they can put to work at those incremental returns are diminishing. The growth market isn’t there.”
“And so trying to understand what category of business that is, and then even if they do have a lot of capital they can put to work, and we’re seeing this in the technology space today.”
“Execution risk is enormous.”
Himalaya Capital’s Li Lu explains why all intelligent investing is value investing
“First of all, the value principle, put it this way, I think all investment, all intelligent investment is value investment. Because you always want to really get a little bit more than what you pay for. You know, what you pay is a price, what you get is value.”
“Whatever value that you can express yourself, whether that is in the business that is stagnant, or even declining but pay you a whole bunch of money back, or is the money of the company that rapidly growing or a bet that only have a small percentage of winning and a large percent of losing, therefore you’re spread. All of that come down to your understanding of where the value will be created because on the basic principle, they’re basically all discounted the future cash flow to the extent you can understand, estimate, accurately estimated. And so they’re all coming down to the same mathematical.”
“And so that’s why I said almost all intelligent investing is value investing. The basic principle doesn’t change. It can apply differently based on where I would go back to the concept that Warren articulated so well about circle of competence. Depends on where your circle of competence is.”
Gavin Baker explains the lessons he learned from Fidelity’s legends, from “panic early or double down late” to “numbers and excuses”
“I deeply admire my friend Antonio Gracias, who runs Valor Equity Partners. I think he’s done unique things and has unique lens that he sees the world through."
"There are great portfolio managers at Fidelity, a woman named Jennifer Uhrig, who she runs a venture fund now. But she at one point, she ran $70 billion, great numbers, to my knowledge, has run more money than any woman in history. And just, you know, she had so many great, you know, pieces of wisdom that have stuck with me. You either have to panic early or double down late and there’s anything in between you get killed and you have to know which one you are and be disciplined about it.”
“My friend, Steve Wymer, who runs a $200 billion fund with absolutely incredible numbers at Fidelity. You know, he really taught me the value of not only hard work, but doing the work yourself. And also just a phrase that, you know, Wymer always had was, there’s only two things in investing. There are numbers and there are excuses. And if you don’t have the first, nobody gives a shit about the second.”
“And then the aforementioned Will Danoff. You know, Will is incredible, because Will asks sometimes what seem like very basic questions but they’re very profound and being asked them, I think maybe sometimes forces the companies to think differently. And he also has this incredible ability to, I would call it play in the present and be completely dispassionate. And I’m not a golfer playing the present just means you can’t let your last bad shot, you know, hurt you, but investing is the same thing. You got to play in the present, you know, whether you’re on a string of hits or a string of misses.”
“And, you know, so I feel like I’ve learned something from, you know, a lot of people. I mean, I’ve certainly, you know, learned a lot from some of your former partners at Benchmark. Yeah, I think it has taken a village to make me the investor that I am.”
Gavin Baker explains the lessons he learned from Fidelity’s legends, from “panic early or double down late” to “numbers and excuses”
“I deeply admire my friend Antonio Gracias, who runs Valor Equity Partners. I think he’s done unique things and has unique lens that he sees the world through."
"There are great portfolio managers at Fidelity, a woman named Jennifer Uhrig, who she runs a venture fund now. But she at one point, she ran $70 billion, great numbers, to my knowledge, has run more money than any woman in history. And just, you know, she had so many great, you know, pieces of wisdom that have stuck with me. You either have to panic early or double down late and there’s anything in between you get killed and you have to know which one you are and be disciplined about it.”
“My friend, Steve Wymer, who runs a $200 billion fund with absolutely incredible numbers at Fidelity. You know, he really taught me the value of not only hard work, but doing the work yourself. And also just a phrase that, you know, Wymer always had was, there’s only two things in investing. There are numbers and there are excuses. And if you don’t have the first, nobody gives a shit about the second.”
“And then the aforementioned Will Danoff. You know, Will is incredible, because Will asks sometimes what seem like very basic questions but they’re very profound and being asked them, I think maybe sometimes forces the companies to think differently. And he also has this incredible ability to, I would call it play in the present and be completely dispassionate. And I’m not a golfer playing the present just means you can’t let your last bad shot, you know, hurt you, but investing is the same thing. You got to play in the present, you know, whether you’re on a string of hits or a string of misses.”
“And, you know, so I feel like I’ve learned something from, you know, a lot of people. I mean, I’ve certainly, you know, learned a lot from some of your former partners at Benchmark. Yeah, I think it has taken a village to make me the investor that I am.”
SurgoCap's Mala Gaonkar explains how she actually defines a moat
“So when I say moat, what do I mean by that? I mean a business that has very high incremental ROICs, because ultimately the value of a business is going to be the return on incremental invested capital times the dollars you can put to work at those incremental returns, right?”
“So it’s a balance of what is driving that ROIC, and multiple ways are really the best ways, right? So if it’s just by driving up price, I don’t love that. But if it’s driving up price and there’s feature innovation and there’s market growth through new geographies or new products, that’s great. So multiple levers on driving ROIC is one.”
“The second is the capital you can put to work at those incremental returns. There are many businesses that have, you know, not many, but there’s some great business that have high incremental returns, but the capital they can put to work at those incremental returns are diminishing. The growth market isn’t there.”
“And so trying to understand what category of business that is, and then even if they do have a lot of capital they can put to work, and we’re seeing this in the technology space today.”
“Execution risk is enormous.”
Fireside Tapes retweeted
Elon Musk says his answer to the meaning of life comes from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the hard part is the question, not the answer, so the goal is expanding consciousness to learn what to ask
“Yeah, so, I came to the conclusion that, which is somewhat, in the Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy school of thought, which is, yeah, you know, he sort of, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is like a book on philosophy disguised as humour."
"And that’s where you get the, you know, Earth turns out to be this computer to understand, to get to figure out the answer of the meaning of life. And it comes up with the answer 42. But then, it’s like, ‘What does 42 mean?’"
"And it turns out, well, actually, the hard part is the question, not the answer. And for that, you need a much bigger computer than Earth. So, basically, what Douglas Adams was saying is that we actually don’t know how to frame the questions properly."
"And so, I think by expanding the scope and scale of consciousness, we can better understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe.”
Jensen Huang says he loves working with Elon Musk, and reveals their engineering teams are designing a new type of server to put data centers in space
“I’m delighted that I love working with Elon. He’s using our technology for his own AI in training models and such, deploying models, of course."
"Grok Bot is super cool. The demand for Grok Bot, the consumption for Grok Bot is really skyrocketing. And then, of course, he rents it."
"And so the combination of these three things, he’s fairly unique in doing that. I guess Google does that. That would be yet another example."
"And so I think he also has the advantage that he loves the intersection between computing and the physical buildouts. He loves that whole area. Nobody knows more about energy than he does."
"One particular new market that we’re going to go explore together is putting data centers out in space. Our two engineering teams are working super closely together to create a new type of server, a new type of architecture that might be super good in space and on Earth.”
SurgoCap's Mala Gaonkar explains how she actually defines a moat
“So when I say moat, what do I mean by that? I mean a business that has very high incremental ROICs, because ultimately the value of a business is going to be the return on incremental invested capital times the dollars you can put to work at those incremental returns, right?”
“So it’s a balance of what is driving that ROIC, and multiple ways are really the best ways, right? So if it’s just by driving up price, I don’t love that. But if it’s driving up price and there’s feature innovation and there’s market growth through new geographies or new products, that’s great. So multiple levers on driving ROIC is one.”
“The second is the capital you can put to work at those incremental returns. There are many businesses that have, you know, not many, but there’s some great business that have high incremental returns, but the capital they can put to work at those incremental returns are diminishing. The growth market isn’t there.”
“And so trying to understand what category of business that is, and then even if they do have a lot of capital they can put to work, and we’re seeing this in the technology space today.”
“Execution risk is enormous.”
In 2000, before Google was Google, Satya Nadella saw the search business coming, and he gave up on it. The ad business inside Google Search now brings in more than $200 billion a year.
This is Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, confessing a call he saw clearly and did not fight for.
The idea, a product called Keywords, belonged to Ali Partovi, a young founder on Satya's team who would not stop pushing it. Satya came around.
"You saw it clearly, and through your evangelism of that I saw it."
Seeing it was never the problem.
The money was already in banner ads, and switching to a keyword auction meant a short-term revenue drop and a fight across teams.
As the senior person in the room he could have forced it, and he didn't.
"But I gave up. And that bugs me. I regret that a lot."
He does not shrink the cost to Microsoft.
"The entire arc of Microsoft's thing was we won the browser war only to lose the web."
The rule he took from it is about who carries the danger when a call is risky and right.
"When you're at the top in particular, the one way you have to create room is by taking risk on your back."
A quarter century on, the engine he walked away from is one of the most profitable businesses ever built. The lesson is not really about search, it is about finding the courage not to let go of what you see clearly.
Bookmark & watch ↓
In 2000, before Google was Google, Satya Nadella saw the search business coming, and he gave up on it. The ad business inside Google Search now brings in more than $200 billion a year.
This is Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, confessing a call he saw clearly and did not fight for.
The idea, a product called Keywords, belonged to Ali Partovi, a young founder on Satya's team who would not stop pushing it. Satya came around.
"You saw it clearly, and through your evangelism of that I saw it."
Seeing it was never the problem.
The money was already in banner ads, and switching to a keyword auction meant a short-term revenue drop and a fight across teams.
As the senior person in the room he could have forced it, and he didn't.
"But I gave up. And that bugs me. I regret that a lot."
He does not shrink the cost to Microsoft.
"The entire arc of Microsoft's thing was we won the browser war only to lose the web."
The rule he took from it is about who carries the danger when a call is risky and right.
"When you're at the top in particular, the one way you have to create room is by taking risk on your back."
A quarter century on, the engine he walked away from is one of the most profitable businesses ever built. The lesson is not really about search, it is about finding the courage not to let go of what you see clearly.
Bookmark & watch ↓
Jensen Huang on the childhood that built him: "my mom didn't even know how to speak English but it didn't stop her from every single day teaching us English"
This is him on why a mother who could not speak English taught it to them every day, what waited on the far side of a Kentucky bridge, and how a nine-year-old learned that not knowing is no reason to stop
"Even if you don't know how to do something it shouldn't stop you"
"The first Chinese kid ever show up in Kentucky - it was 1973"
"Some of the planks were missing and they'd be on the other side waiting for me"
"That was my job, clean the bathrooms, and I did that every day"
Bookmark & watch the conversation ↓
Fireside Tapes retweeted
Jensen Huang on the childhood that built him: "my mom didn't even know how to speak English but it didn't stop her from every single day teaching us English"
This is him on why a mother who could not speak English taught it to them every day, what waited on the far side of a Kentucky bridge, and how a nine-year-old learned that not knowing is no reason to stop
"Even if you don't know how to do something it shouldn't stop you"
"The first Chinese kid ever show up in Kentucky - it was 1973"
"Some of the planks were missing and they'd be on the other side waiting for me"
"That was my job, clean the bathrooms, and I did that every day"
Bookmark & watch the conversation ↓
When Lisa Su became CEO of AMD in 2014, the company's share of the server market had collapsed to about 1%, and she walked into the boardroom asking for five years and three chip generations to turn it around. AMD's server share is now over 40%.
This is her telling the story of that comeback, and the years AMD had to spend going backward before any of it worked:
She did not inherit a near-leader that had stumbled. She inherited a product line she already knew could not win, built on a roadmap of the wrong calls.
"when I joined AMD we were probably about, I don't know, maybe 10% market share in servers but we had a completely uncompetitive roadmap"
The fix was not a patch. It meant throwing out that roadmap and accepting that the numbers would fall before they rose.
"the decision that we had to make is we had to start over ... we actually have to go down before we can go up"
Going backward was not a figure of speech. In her first few years the share she had inherited was cut to a tenth of itself, and only then did the climb start.
"when I took over as CEO, we were probably at 1% market share ... in three years, we went from 10% to 1%. And I think we just finished last year at like bit over 40%"
So she told the board the truth about the clock. Not one product cycle, but three, and half a decade before the work would show.
"I told my board, look, this is going to take three generations and five years"
The hardest part was never the engineering. It was asking a board to accept going down before going up, and to keep investing through the years before the climb showed. She got the time she asked for, and a 1% business became over 40% of the server market.
Bookmark & watch ↓
Fireside Tapes retweeted
Matt Murphy on the bet that remade Marvell: "we spent 85% of our enterprise value to buy it"
This is him explaining how he pivoted a $2 billion consumer chip company off consumer, why he put most of the company into one acquisition, and why he calls capital allocation his number one job
"I wasn't handed a strong deck at all for where the puck was going - I had no assets to go after this cloud AI thing at all back then"
"now we're in the biggest infrastructure build in the history of mankind"
"the day we announced it, we rerated the entire Marvell multiple up to the Cavium multiple"
"I don't think I ever thought it could be as big as it got so far - And I actually think we have way more runway ahead of us"
"it sounds like the most boring thing in the world but that's like my number one job"
Bookmark & watch the full segment ↓
Jensen Huang on the childhood that built him: "my mom didn't even know how to speak English but it didn't stop her from every single day teaching us English"
This is him on why a mother who could not speak English taught it to them every day, what waited on the far side of a Kentucky bridge, and how a nine-year-old learned that not knowing is no reason to stop
"Even if you don't know how to do something it shouldn't stop you"
"The first Chinese kid ever show up in Kentucky - it was 1973"
"Some of the planks were missing and they'd be on the other side waiting for me"
"That was my job, clean the bathrooms, and I did that every day"
Bookmark & watch the conversation ↓
Matt Murphy on the bet that remade Marvell: "we spent 85% of our enterprise value to buy it"
This is him explaining how he pivoted a $2 billion consumer chip company off consumer, why he put most of the company into one acquisition, and why he calls capital allocation his number one job
"I wasn't handed a strong deck at all for where the puck was going - I had no assets to go after this cloud AI thing at all back then"
"now we're in the biggest infrastructure build in the history of mankind"
"the day we announced it, we rerated the entire Marvell multiple up to the Cavium multiple"
"I don't think I ever thought it could be as big as it got so far - And I actually think we have way more runway ahead of us"
"it sounds like the most boring thing in the world but that's like my number one job"
Bookmark & watch the full segment ↓
Jensen Huang on the childhood that built him: "my mom didn't even know how to speak English but it didn't stop her from every single day teaching us English"
This is him on why a mother who could not speak English taught it to them every day, what waited on the far side of a Kentucky bridge, and how a nine-year-old learned that not knowing is no reason to stop
"Even if you don't know how to do something it shouldn't stop you"
"The first Chinese kid ever show up in Kentucky - it was 1973"
"Some of the planks were missing and they'd be on the other side waiting for me"
"That was my job, clean the bathrooms, and I did that every day"
Bookmark & watch the conversation ↓
Fireside Tapes retweeted
Alexandr Wang reveals Meta CFO Susan Li pulled him aside "many times" at an exec offsite in Hawaii to warn that if the model didn't work, it would be very, very bad in financial terms
ZUCKERBERG: "So I think this is part of the excitement of booting up a frontier lab now, where it is basically like the ante is extremely high."
WANG: "And I think this is, and I kind of viscerally remember this. We were in Hawaii at the end of last year. It was kind of like the whole exec team got together."
"And yeah, Susan pulled me aside many times and was like, you know, I just want to tell you if this doesn't work, this is going to be really, really bad. It's going to be very, very bad in financial terms."
"It's like, it has to be good. If it's good, it's all good. We're great. But if it's bad, it's really, really, really bad."
$META Devansh Tandon reveals the tokens-in, engagement-out flywheel behind Meta's recommendation system, where better models lift Reels watch time 30% and the monetization pays for the next training run
"These scaling curves aren't just academic research. They're driving real product impact at scale for some of the biggest consumer businesses in the world."
"Here's a couple of examples I have from Meta's recent earnings reports. Instagram Reels had a strong quarter, 30% year on year watch time."
"And the optimizations we made to improve the quality of recommendations included simplifying our ranking architecture to enable efficient model scaling and longer interaction histories to identify a person's interests."
"We doubled the length of user interaction sequences used for training Instagram and increased the richness of each user interaction."
"So these are direct parallels to the power law scaling curves for LLMs."
"And I want to introduce this idea of a flywheel of tokens in engagement out, which is what's powering all of these recs models scaling."
"You train a model, you then run inference on it, which is the tokens in, that recommendation model results in better content recommendations, it drives consumer engagement, daily active users' time spent, it translates to monetization and ads or subscription, which pays for the next model training run."
"And so every step on the scaling curve is one loop around this flywheel, and a lot of consumer apps are spinning this core flywheel at the heart of their business. So we have a long way to scale these recommender systems."
_______
For the full breakdown of the lecture on Meta's ads recommendation system: firesidealpha.substack.com/p…
Jensen Huang on the childhood that built him: "my mom didn't even know how to speak English but it didn't stop her from every single day teaching us English"
This is him on why a mother who could not speak English taught it to them every day, what waited on the far side of a Kentucky bridge, and how a nine-year-old learned that not knowing is no reason to stop
"Even if you don't know how to do something it shouldn't stop you"
"The first Chinese kid ever show up in Kentucky - it was 1973"
"Some of the planks were missing and they'd be on the other side waiting for me"
"That was my job, clean the bathrooms, and I did that every day"
Bookmark & watch the conversation ↓
When Lisa Su became CEO of AMD in 2014, the company's share of the server market had collapsed to about 1%, and she walked into the boardroom asking for five years and three chip generations to turn it around. AMD's server share is now over 40%.
This is her telling the story of that comeback, and the years AMD had to spend going backward before any of it worked:
She did not inherit a near-leader that had stumbled. She inherited a product line she already knew could not win, built on a roadmap of the wrong calls.
"when I joined AMD we were probably about, I don't know, maybe 10% market share in servers but we had a completely uncompetitive roadmap"
The fix was not a patch. It meant throwing out that roadmap and accepting that the numbers would fall before they rose.
"the decision that we had to make is we had to start over ... we actually have to go down before we can go up"
Going backward was not a figure of speech. In her first few years the share she had inherited was cut to a tenth of itself, and only then did the climb start.
"when I took over as CEO, we were probably at 1% market share ... in three years, we went from 10% to 1%. And I think we just finished last year at like bit over 40%"
So she told the board the truth about the clock. Not one product cycle, but three, and half a decade before the work would show.
"I told my board, look, this is going to take three generations and five years"
The hardest part was never the engineering. It was asking a board to accept going down before going up, and to keep investing through the years before the climb showed. She got the time she asked for, and a 1% business became over 40% of the server market.
Bookmark & watch ↓