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In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen

Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes

In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen

Norges Bank Investment Management

Norges Bank, Nicolai Tangen, Business, In Good Company

4.7 • 236 Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2026

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary


What separates truly great businesses from the rest? Mala Gaonkar, founder of hedge fund SurgoCap Partners, joins Nicolai Tangen to discuss identifying companies with durable competitive advantages. They cover how old technologies disrupt in new ways, why she keeps her investment team deliberately small, and how data science helps reduce cognitive biases. Mala shares candid investment lessons including the pitfalls of shorting Nokia and not revisiting NVIDIA after selling. She also reflects on balancing her career with creative writing and philanthropic work in global health. With $6 billion in assets under management, SurgoCap proves that focus and curiosity drive results.

In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New full episodes every Wednesday, and don't miss our Highlight episodes every Friday. 

 

The production team for this episode includes Isabelle Karlsson and PLAN-B's Niklas Figenschau Johansen, Sebastian Langvik-Hansen and Pål Huuse. Background research was conducted by David Høysæther.

 


Disclaimers: The information contained in this episode is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute, and should not be construed as, an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities or related financial instruments.


The specific investment examples discussed during this podcast are included for illustrative purposes to indicate Mala Gaonkar’s investment process and strategy and the types of companies that Mala believes are representative of a particular theme. It should not be assumed that any investment discussed herein has been or will be profitable, or that recommendations made in the future will be profitable or will equal the investment performance of the specific investment examples discussed herein. There is no guarantee that companies mentioned in this podcast are those in which Surgo invests in or will be included in any Surgo portfolio in the future.


The trends and conclusions presented in this podcast reflect the opinions of Mala, based on her own analysis. As such, the opinions and conclusions expressed should not be viewed as definite or exhaustive, and other interpretations or outcomes are possible based on different perspectives or more comprehensive, or different, data.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hi everybody. I'm Nicola Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sorean Wealth Fund.

0:05.0

And today I'm really happy because I'm here with Mala Gaonkar, who I've known for a long time, actually.

0:11.0

Mala founded Sergo Cap with $1.8 billion, and now it's at $6 billion.

0:17.0

And before that, she spent 23 years as a founding partner of loan pine capital

0:22.6

one of the most successful hedge funds of all times great to have you here great to be here

0:27.5

nikolai thank you tell me about sergey ke partners, you know, your company.

0:41.8

Yeah, Sergo Cap tries to do what many investment firms try to do. It tries to beat the market over a three to five year cycle with less risk than the market, a risk defined as loss of capital, not volatility. And the way we

0:56.7

try to achieve that is by identifying this very small handful of truly great businesses that exist

1:02.1

in the world. And we do that through a, our product is really our process, a very transparent

1:08.5

process, of looking for very specific factors

1:12.9

that really are distillation, as you pointed out earlier, of my lessons I've learned, the many

1:18.1

mistakes and lessons I've learned from investing over 23 years with some of the best people

1:24.0

in the business, my former colleagues at Lompine. And so that distillation has led to

1:28.9

Sergo. There are many different factors that lead to identification of a truly brilliant business.

1:33.0

But the way I define a great business is a business with very long duration motes. And duration

1:37.8

really is our true differentiation. So mode being that is difficult to compete with them,

1:41.6

it's difficult to compete them out. How many great companies are there in the world?

1:47.7

As I said, a small handful. I don't think there are that many.

1:55.6

We focus on really four verticals where I think there is a bit of an edge from one very specific factor. Every business is a technology business, right? So if you're an aerospace company or a med tech business or a financial data business,

2:04.6

you are a technology company in your backbone.

2:06.6

If you want to deliver at scale and with quality, you have to be a tech business.

2:09.6

And I think understanding the tech stack map of businesses is something we spend a lot of time on,

...

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