Eric Mandelblatt - Investing in the Industrial Economy

**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** (1:54)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:20)
My guest today is Eric Mandelblatt, founder and CIO of Soroban Capital, a $10 billion investment firm. While many of my conversations focus on technology and emerging industries, Eric has deep roots investing in the industrial economy, which made this conversation a fun change of pace.
We discussed why energy and materials represent such a small share of the market today, how the global push towards decarbonization could have massive impacts on the industrial economy moving forward, and how Eric evaluates this dynamic opportunity set. Please enjoy this deep dive discussion with Eric Mandelblatt.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:53)
Quick editor's note before the episode, this conversation was recorded on February 15th before last week's invasion of Ukraine.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:01)
Eric, since this conversation is going to be an incredible depth about industrials specifically and a huge set of themes that you and the firm have been working on for a long time, I think it is really appropriate to set the stage a little bit. Normally, I'd handle background information and the introductions. I'm the kind of person that skips the childhood section of biographies. But in this particular case, it's a big and fairly new topic for us. So I think the background of where you're coming from is really important. So maybe you can give us the thumbnail sketch of Soroban's history and why you were the right person to be talking to about this big theme.

**Eric Mandelblatt** (3:34)
Sure. Well, first of all, I appreciate you having me on the podcast. I'm honored to be here, Patrick.
Maybe let me take you one step back further, which is where I started my career. I was hired in 1998 at Goldman Sachs as a natural gas analyst. Ironically, the biggest company we covered at the time was Enron. We covered natural gas pipelines, utilities.
I learned about the commodity business at Goldman in 1998 to 2002, ultimately transferred into one of the proprietary investing groups at Goldman and then left to help start a hedge fund by the name of TPG-Axon Capital in 2005 and then landed at Soroban and launched the firm in 2010 I tell a funny story, when we launched our firm, folks thought of our firm as being an energy-focused hedge fund. We had to wave our hands in the air and say, no, no, no, we're investing in consumer, we're investing in tech, we're investing in business services industries as well. But the core roots of the firm originally were really on the commodities and industrial side, which is just my background, given where I started my career at Goldman.