The new ethos permeating the investment world

Here’s a new theory of mine: the VC-funded mantra of “move fast and break things” is over. In its place, investors and operators are employing a new strategy — one built around prioritizing durability over speed of growth.

This week, I wrote about this idea in a new column for Big Think. The central thesis of the piece is simple: companies built on chaos often struggle to survive in the long term. And as artificial intelligence upends legacy business models, many are recognizing the timeless value of prioritizing stability over speed. 

This is a good development. It’s also further evidence that investors who take a longer-than-average time frame stand to reap massive rewards. The silver lining to all this short-term thinking is that it creates compelling opportunities for investors who prefer to think long-term.

Key quote: “Over the last few months, I have been speaking with executives and entrepreneurs about this specific idea. And I am hearing the same things over and over again. We share a mentality of building businesses based around a long-term approach with solid foundations. Strategies that don’t chase the latest trend. A dedication to craft, precision, and focus. Patience and quality. A mindset that champions long-term survival tactics over short-term bursts of growth.”

How to play an infinite games 

John Candeto’s investment philosophy is relatively simple: survival comes first, then growth. His version of playing the long game hinges on two essential questions: (1) How do we survive? (2) And how do we expose ourselves to opportunities that can accelerate wealth.

John recently spoke about this subject — as well as power laws, learning in public, writing family stories, and values — with Bogumil Baranowski, who hosts the Talking Billions podcast.  “If you’re trying to play an infinite game, which was always sort of the only game that made sense to me, then first you have to survive,” John says. He continues: 

Key quote:  “As racing drivers often say, ‘To finish first, you must first finish.’ And so this question of, ‘how do we make sure, no matter what happens, we survive to play the game?’ seemed like the most logical first question to answer. If we divide what we do now and how I invest, we ask two simple but difficult questions. The first is, how do we survive? I would define that as being resilient to many future states. The second is, how do we expose ourselves to wise ways to accelerate the growth of wealth?”

A few more links I enjoyed: 

Uber Wants You to Hail a Robotaxi – via Hard Fork

Key quote: “The Uber chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, joins us in the studio to discuss his company’s new partnership with Waymo, the autonomous vehicle company, and the future of that industry.”

Generative AI’s Act o1 – via Sequoia Capital

Key quote: “‍As the LLM market structure stabilizes, the next frontier is now emerging. The focus is shifting to the development and scaling of the reasoning layer, where “System 2” thinking takes precedence. Inspired by models like AlphaGo, this layer aims to endow AI systems with deliberate reasoning, problem-solving and cognitive operations at inference time that go beyond rapid pattern matching. And new cognitive architectures and user interfaces are shaping how these reasoning capabilities are delivered to and interact with users.”

Longriver Partners Fund – via Graham Rhodes

Key quote: “Wealth is created by investing scarce capital at high rates of return over long periods of time. Our investment strategy is to buy shares of companies that can achieve this for us through a combination of competitiveness, opportunity and audacity. We protect ourselves from the uncertainty of the future by buying those shares at cheap prices, when available. This is our margin of safety.”

The Run – via Ian Cassel

Key quote: “If you consider yourself a stock picker — at some point in your life you must do the work others aren’t willing to do and form extreme conviction in something you believe in…. Finding great companies early has never gone out of style and never will. Yes, it’s easy to say and hard to do. It’s hard to find them, and even harder to hold them. What makes it harder still is that a small percentage of the winners will become sustainable monster winners. Most of the winners will eventually fall right back down. They have a short shelf life. Very few deserve to be held for 5+ years.”

From the archives:

Russell Baker at Connecticut College (1995)

Key quote: “All right, let’s plunge right ahead into the dull part. That’s the part where the commencement speaker tells the graduates to go forth into the world, then gives advice on what to do when they get out there. This is a ridiculous waste of time. The graduates never take the advice, as I have learned from long experience. The best advice I can give anybody about going out into the world is this: Don’t do it. I have been out there. It is a mess.”