5/52: VALUEx Klosters

#CapitalAtRisk

Above: Postcard from VALUEx

The 2010s was the decade of the Entrepreneur. The 2020s will be the decade of the Investor.

“The more bad ideas the better. If you work really hard on coming up with bad ideas, sooner or later, some good ideas are going to slip through. This is much easier than the opposite approach”

Seth Godin

Investment ideas worth sharing

This week I went to VALUEx Klosters, hosted by Guy Spier, and it was superb. Guy has run this annual conference since 2011 to connect good people and share ideas under the principles of confidentiality, non-solicitation and gestalt.

Around 50 of us were chosen to speak about an investment idea worth sharing and mine was entitled, ‘Understanding Quiddity¹’. I shared the ‘bad idea’ that 9others was (low-tech, non-scaleable, not free but no profit either) but how, 12+ years later, it’s a critical part of my investment process and that by understanding quiddity I can then evaluate the most important part of a business better than anyone else: The founder.

Speaking with Willian Green on the train ride back to Zurich he mentioned that the really great investment ideas have a simplicity about them but they can take years to come up with.