John Pfeffer - Adapt and Evolve

**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.
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**SPEAKER_2** (2:05)
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** (2:30)
My guest today is entrepreneur and investor, John Pfeffer. John was a partner at private equity firm, KKR, in the 2000s, chairman of the leading French IT company, Groupe Allium, in the 90s, and now invests his own money through his private family office, Pfeffer Capital. John is one of the smartest investors that I know and our conversation spans all John's experiences and ideas.
We discussed the difference between value creation and value capture, why John has made such a big bet on one asset, and why adaptation has become more important than ever. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did with my friend, John Pfeffer.
So John, this is gonna be a wide ranging conversation. We had a really fun preparatory conversation last week and I've been looking forward to it ever since. Because of your interesting, unique background and completely open investing mandate, meaning you can invest in anything and do across the world, that understanding the lens through which you're coming at all this via some of your formative investing experiences would be a great place to start. Let's begin there. Maybe give the audience a thumbnail sketch of your background and maybe do so if you can via what you view looking back as some of the formative investing experiences that formed your worldview and inform your curiosity about the world.

**John Pfeffer** (3:45)
I've lived in 10 countries, spent time in many more, but actually lived in 10 different countries, in different industries. I was in the video industry in the 1980s, the tech industry in the 90s, then private equity in the 2000s. Now we're building a retail business of all things.
And so obviously living in different language bubbles, which tends to be what media and information often structures around to some extent, and perceptions of the same facts vary quite a lot when you do that, when you're consuming information in different languages, in different countries, in different perspectives and so forth. And then having changed networks successively over my life. When you say changing industries, that's one thing, but also what that does mean is I'll decide to do something, to build a business in something, and I'll go build it, and I'll build this network, and I'll build a reputation and be somebody in that space.