Lessons

• In all things, always double down on your winners. If you were right all along but didn’t hold enough ownership, aren’t you going to feel like an idiot?

• Invest in the micro; ignore the macro. Doing this alone will set you apart from other investors keeping up with the 24-hour news cycle.

• Look for existing moats, not theoretical ones. If a company has to pitch you on what their moat will look like, you have to determine how realistic that outcome will be.

• At the end of the day there is a scoreboard, and the only thing that matters is returns. Especially true today, distributed capital is more important than markups.

• You have to invest in the world’s most important companies in order to generate the best returns. Nobody in the world is smart enough to know where those companies will come from. This is why Brian is a generalist.

• If we were going to maximize returns, we would do it over a longer timeline. The compromise is a typical fund cycle (10 years + 2 years of extensions).

• Teams + moats + strategies > everything else.

• Good moats should be obvious. Good software will get cloned; you need something else.

• Different people, different evaluation processes. Brian is not a spreadsheet junkie, but other people at Founders Fund are. The fund does not force their investment team into all looking into things through the same lens.