There is a neat post on Redfin’s blog. It is the CEO’s “IPO diary.” Read the whole thing for a fascinating look at the process from the inside. A couple of sections really resonated with me:
Masters of the Universe
In other ways too, the roadshow had the feel of a bygone era. For example, almost everyone on the buy-side we met that week was a man: in one group lunch, all 24 of the portfolio managers in attendance were male. We may have met more portfolio managers who were Israeli special forces veterans than women. I asked our bankers how long it would take the first one to kill me with his bare hands.Almost all of them took notes on tablets. Some of them tried to look up as you spoke, but with their eyes focused on nothing except the numbers in their head. They weren’t just capturing the highlights of a meeting; it was a nearly verbatim transcription of what we’d said, so we could be held accountable for it later. Information in every form is the currency of Wall Street, and drops of it never seem to fall on the floor.
Chess with Bobby Fischer
Most of the fund managers were exotically, obviously smart. Except for one person who fell asleep in a meeting, none of the fund managers we met was anyone I’d want to be on the other side of a trade with, buying what he sold, or selling what he bought. This is what I realized I had been doing my whole life as an E-Trade stock-picker; it had been like challenging Bobby Fischer to a game of chess. I spent a long time that first week trying to judge whether it made sense to have so many brilliant people decide where our society allocates capital, as opposed to making cars or software or hospitals.The Last Ideology-Free Realm
What impressed me most about these people was their willingness to change their minds. No one in our society seems to change her mind about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton based on a new fact, but a fund manager on the wrong side of a bad trade has to change her mind in a moment or lose her job. This is why investing is the world’s last ideology-free realm. It would be easier to accept the premise that our society can’t agree on one version of the truth anymore, about whether temperatures are rising or the economy is growing, except that’s exactly what happens when every public company reports its earnings every quarter. You can believe what you want to believe, but not with a million dollars on the line.
And, perhaps most interesting to me:
The Last, Best Order
One of my favorite meetings was with a Scottish fund manager in San Francisco. His firm was known for buying only a few stocks, and holding each for as long as a decade. In a hotel meeting room with enough prospectuses, pitchbooks, cookies, fruit, cheeses, crackers and popcorn for 30 people, he came in alone. And rather than rattling through twenty or thirty questions about our metrics, he just asked me why I ran the company.I found myself talking about my older brother, who had died just before I became Redfin’s CEO, and the feeling I had then that my life so far hadn’t made the world a much better place. He asked me about whether Redfin’s sense of mission would survive our public offering. He didn’t write much down. His order was one of the last, and the best, to come in.
My aspiration as an investor is to be that “last, best order.” There’s a reason I classified this post under Finance, Investing, Learning and Values. There is some real insight here.