Beating the Market 15 Years in a Row, Lessons from Jeff Bezos | Lisa Rapuano
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2024
⏱️ 113 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Lisa Rapuano outperformed the market 15 years in a row in the 90’s and 2000’s. We go deep on how she did it, including early investments in AOL, Dell, and owning 24% of Amazon in 2002.
She shares what she learned from Jeff Bezos and Michael Dell, what makes a good investor, plus her experience as a startup CFO and how it influenced how she thinks about investing.
For full show notes, visit: https://highlightai.com/share/883f2cc9-9771-4331-9a42-6ae236f50344
Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (03:18) Growing up middle class while dad worked at NASA (12:31) Moving to Baltimore to work for Bill Miller (18:12) What Lisa learned from Bill (19:41) How value investing changed over the last 30 years (26:40) Investing in internet stocks in the 90’s and 00’s (29:50) Thinking a 13x win on AOL in 1996 would be the biggest of her career (37:33) Teaching Barry Diller about the internet (41:30) How Dell reinvented PC manufacturing and created a negative cash conversion cycle (46:46) How Amazon survived the Dot Com Crash (51:53) Buying 24% of Amazon in 2002 (53:15) Why companies get the investors they deserve (57:22) What Lisa learned from Jeff Bezos (1:04:31) Lessons from raising too much money (1:07:57) Running her own fund from 2006-2016 (1:13:32) Why fees in asset management are too high (1:15:20) Joining Facet out of retirement 2017 (1:20:20) What she learned about investing from operating (1:23:47) Why women are better investors than men (1:26:43) How to hire outlier candidates (1:35:06) Why no one can be the next Warren Buffett (1:39:54) When to sell your winners
Follow Lisa:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-rapuano/
Follow Turner:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Less than a billion dollar market cap had flexibility to become free cash flow positive when they wanted to. |
| 0:04.7 | I understood that Jeff was trying to build something way bigger than what people thought he was. |
| 0:10.1 | Also, we had the benefit that in 2001, no one else wanted to talk to Amazon except us. |
| 0:14.8 | And we owned 24% of it. |
| 0:16.2 | Wait, so you owned 24% of Amazon. |
| 0:18.4 | We did. |
| 0:19.1 | And we didn't know there was a law in Washington that you can't own |
| 0:21.7 | more than 20% of a company based in Washington. Yeah. So I don't know, our lawyers had to like go to |
| 0:26.8 | Washington and file special things and get a special dispensation to allow us to own our 24%. |
| 0:32.7 | Welcome to the Peel. I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder of NAN Capital. Today's guest is Lisa Rapuano. Lisa is known for outperforming the market 15 years in a row, |
| 0:43.3 | the first time with renowned investor Bill Miller at Leg Mason, the next five, running her own fund, Lane 5. |
| 0:49.3 | We get into how they transformed value investing in the 90s. |
| 0:52.3 | You're not going to get an edge by doing the same thing that everybody else does. |
| 0:55.0 | You have to figure out a way to think about it differently. |
| 0:59.0 | What Lisa learned from Jeff Bezos. |
| 1:01.0 | Watching him struggle through some of the early challenges was very insightful to me like, |
| 1:06.0 | okay, even the smartest, most committed person might fail. |
| 1:10.0 | What she taught Jeff. |
| 1:11.6 | And any company that can invest its capital above the cost of capital should do it all day long. |
| 1:17.6 | If you can reinvest your money in further expanding your competitive advantage, you should be doing that. |
| 1:23.6 | And even if you make sure financials look like crap. |
| 1:25.6 | Mistakes Amazon made after the dot-com bubble. And I think Jeff would look back and be like, yeah, we should have never done that. What she learned from Michael Dell. It's very hard to do a massive transformation of a business in the public eye. And what she taught Barry Diller at ICE. And I remember Bill and I sitting him down and being like, so there's this thing called the internet. And it's going to be a big deal for you. Before we talk to Lisa, I publish new episodes every week, exploring the world's greatest |
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