#364 Nick & Zak's Excellent Adventure: How Nick Sleep and Qais Zaharia Built Their Investment Partnership

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Here's something exciting for you. I am doing a live podcast next Monday, September 16th, in New York City, with my friend Patrick from Invest Like The Best. It is free because of the good people, my friends at Ramp. It is going to be at Ramp's headquarters in Manhattan. If you live in New York, you want to attend, or if you want to hop on a plane, for that matter, and fly to New York on short notice next week, there is a link down below on your podcast player, and you can use that link to register to attend. You got to move fast. Space is very, very limited. I'm very grateful to the founders of RAMP for offering to do this, to offering to make it free for all. One thing that's really important to the founders of RAMP who have become good friends and I spend a lot of time with, it's also important to me, it's also important to Nick and Zak and the crazy story that you're about to hear, and that is this relentless dedication to quality. As you're about to find out, Nick Sleep and his partner, Zak, have this cult-like following, this mystique about them. Not only do they have this phenomenal performance in the very unique and maverick way they built their fund and their partnership, a partnership that made their investors about $2 billion in profit in 10 years. But Nick and Zak's organizing principle was around caring intensely about the quality of your actions and decisions. And so they made very few but heavily concentrated bets on what they thought were the highest quality businesses run by the highest quality founders. And in this book, Nick and Zak talk about the qualities that these world-class founders have. And if you've been listening to Founders for a while now, this is not going to come as a surprise for you. They said these formidably efficient companies kept costs low. At one point, they have about 70% of their net worth tied up in Amazon. They talk about what they loved about. One of the things they loved about Bezos is that Jeff Bezos was ruthlessly efficient about controlling costs. Nick and Zak's partnership started before Founders existed and ended before Founders existed. And yet it is through their relentless study of the history of entrepreneurship that they arrived at the exact same conclusion. It's exactly what Andrew Carnegie said. He'd repeat the mantra over and over again that profits and prices are cyclical. They're subject to any number of transient forces on the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly controlled. And in Andrew Carnegie's view, any savings achieved in the costs were permanent. And it is because he believed that there's a line in Andrew Carnegie's biography that says cost control became an obsession. The reason I partnered with Ramp is because Ramp shares that obsession. The reason Ramp exists is to give you everything you need to control your spend. Ramp gives you everything you need to control your cost. Ramp gives you easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting and cost control. I've been spending a lot of time with their CTO and co-founder and a good friend of mine, Kareem, and their heads of AI. The technical talent inside of Ramp, which I'll tell you more about in the upcoming weeks, is incredible. When you become a Ramp customer, that means you have these mad scientists and math and technical geniuses working 24 hours a day building products that help you run an efficient organization. Check out Ramp's website. I think it's incredible. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business control costs. That is ramp.com.
Nick Sleep wanted to stay in Edinburgh. So he looked around to see what Edinburgh was good at. And he learned that Edinburgh had a reputation for fund management. So he read an obscure book titled Investment Trust Explained to help him figure out what the investing business was all about. He came away intrigued. He said, I like the sense of it being an intellectual investigation. So Sleep landed a job as a trainee investment analyst at a small Scottish fund company. He was not abundantly qualified for the job. At college, he had studied geology and then switched to geography. His employment history offered no evidence that he was going to be good for a career in finance. He had worked in a department store, at an IT firm, and had been a sponsored windsurfer. Still, he had stumbled into a field that perfectly suited his idiosyncratic mind. Like all of the best investors, Sleep views the world from an unusual angle. Sleep commented on this, saying all the way back in high school, he says, I got comfortable with being different from everyone else early on. I was happy being outside the group. When Sleep was about 20, he read the book Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, An Inquiry into Values.