Ali Hamed - Building an Investment Firm

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:51)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of PositiveSum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum.
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**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:20)
My guest today is Ali Hamed. I first spoke to Ali on this podcast six years ago. He was 26 at the time and four years into building his investing firm CoVenture. I said at the time that Ali is an example of what's possible when you think creatively and today's conversation underlines that point. Six years on, CoVenture now manages $2.5 billion and Ali continues to find alpha in esoteric places.
We talk about YouTube catalogs, creative opportunities in real estate and how venture investing helps them get better at credit. We also talk about his lessons from building an investment firm and what it's like to work with Michael Ovitz more recently. If you want to go deeper on a specific case study with Ali, I'd encourage you to listen to him, Breakdowns Spotter and their YouTube strategy on business breakdowns. You'll find a link to that in the show notes. Now, please enjoy this great conversation with Ali Hamed.
All right, so this is a really cool opening stat, which I just realized this morning. Last time we did this versus today, CoVenture, the business that you started in your dorm room is 10 times the size that it was last time we talked, which was I think in 2018-ish, something like that.

**Ali Hamed** (3:27)
That sounds right.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:28)
So call it 200 something million of assets to two something billion of assets.
One, I just think that's incredibly cool and interesting. And congratulations on having built something consequential like that. But it's also a great way, since there has been just objective growth, to talk about the lessons on the investing side that you've learned in that intervening six years, and the lessons on the firm building side, which when you build a firm that size, and in your case with multiple strategies, multiple asset classes, lots of people, it's really hard to build any business but an asset manager too. That's kind of how I would like to steer the conversation. And maybe beginning on the investing side, because when we first met, the thing that stood out about you was this just like almost childlike love of exploring new things emerging in capital markets. I think we called that episode creative investing or something like that. And at the time you were pioneering a new style of credit investing. Maybe just describe what that has been like. Do you feel like you've continued that childlike exuberance for things?