Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:04)
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, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is a principal and portfolio manager at 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** (0:46)
My guest this week is Kevin Simler, who along with the great Paul Graham is my favorite essay writer operating today.
Like Graham, Simler has a background in technology. He was one of the earliest employees and engineers at Palantir Technologies, which specializes in big data and has worked closely with clients ranging from the Department of Defense to the world's largest hedge funds. We discuss a wide range of topics, including startup culture, how to spark creativity, how social status functions like money, and as you would expect from two philosophy majors, how to think about the universe. You can find show notes for this episode at investorfieldguide.com forward slash simler, S-I-M-L-E-R, which will include links to some of his best essays. Without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Kevin Simler.
Maybe we could go into startup culture because this is going to be, at least for me, selfishly the area that I know virtually nothing about. Obviously, you know a lot about having worked at Palantir.

**Kevin Simler** (1:45)
Might also be one of the areas where I have put into practice some of my readings.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:50)
Well, there you go.
I've seen you write that Palantir was and always will be a startup. It has maybe-

**Kevin Simler** (1:56)
In my heart.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:57)
Right. Maintained some essence of what startup culture allows to happen.
For example, I work at a small business. We're certainly not a startup.
Maybe no small business stays small on purpose, but growth isn't always the ambition and maybe it shouldn't be. A lot of small businesses could probably benefit from a startup-like culture even if they're going to remain small. So sort of with a mind towards that as well, what and I've heard you describe it as a frontier. Maybe flesh that idea out that the difference between a frontier and something that's settled as a metaphor for startups.

**Kevin Simler** (2:34)
At least in my mind, and this might not be true, but the frontier is, if not synonymous with growth, at least highly implicative of growth. The reason you go out to the frontier, the American frontier especially, was new opportunities. You were probably constrained in some way back home on the East Coast, and so you head out and it's expansive and it's open, full of possibility, and so there's that growth mindset I think inherent in exploring the frontier.
Certainly there must be some frontiers where, but the reason you go to it is to grow. No one would choose to go to the frontier unless they were hoping to get more than where and where they came from.
I wonder about the potential for growth as a determining factor in what is startup culture and that optimism and that feeling that you're at the beginning of something that's going to be bigger is, for me, it was a huge part of my experience and I think it is part of everyone's experience who does a startup. I wonder about these smaller companies that don't have that, even if it's just a story, a story of how they're going to be 10 times, 100 times bigger someday. We need all of these different parts of the economy. I also wonder, I think Peter Thiel has some thesis about how democracy only works as long as the economy is growing because as soon as something becomes like a zero sum situation, all of our institutions start to break down.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (4:06)
Didn't he also say, was he the guy that said that, his big thing is that we haven't made a lot of progress, especially in the physical sense, that the fact that we hit the Pacific and there was nothing really on earth, there's nothing left to explore, there is no physical frontier anymore, that there is, that that impacts the way that we think. Do you think that's true or do you think that there's still, like in your experience, for example, at Palantir, is there, are there still plenty of frontiers, digital, mental, that we can chase?