Korea’s Hidden Value: Activism, AI & Golfzon | Ryan Albert

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Tobias Carlisle (0:58)

We're live.

This is Value After Hours. I'm Tobias Carlisle, joined as always by my co-host Jake Taylor. Our special guest today is Ryan Albert of Turton Capital. He has a global focus on governance. We're going to talk career particularly. Welcome Ryan. How are you?

Ryan Albert (1:16)

I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.

Tobias Carlisle (1:19)

Our pleasure. Tell us a little bit about you and your background.

Ryan Albert (1:24)

A little bit about me and my background. Well, I'm based here right now in Newport Beach, Irvine, California. That's also where I grew up. I did my undergraduate at Princeton University. I was a varsity baseball player there as well, so competitive athlete my entire life.

Worked in New York for a few years after graduating from Princeton, started doing investment banking, and later worked at a kind of hybrid VCP fund that was almost like a family office-backed fund, and had an itch to go work abroad, and actually ended up then working in Mexico City for a Mexico-based venture capital fund, doing early-stage investing. Realized that the long-term process-oriented nature of early-stage tech investing was maybe not as suited for my more quick-paced action and then felt that public equity investing was something that could be for me. I read all the value investing books as a lover of Moneyball. With my baseball background, Moneyball made a lot of sense for what value investing is and decided that's the path I wanted for me. So decided to go to business school. I went to Columbia Business School, did the value investing program there. And then the past, call it six plus years, been public equities. I started working with a family office-backed fund called Brizio Capital, based out of New York City, looking at global equities, looked at everything from Latin American stocks to Asian stocks to African stocks, American stocks, pure, truly long-term oriented fundamental equity investing. Learned a great deal there. Then I had an opportunity to go work at Berkshire Hathaway. Worked under Todd Combs and learned a lot from Todd. Complete change of pace, mainly looking at larger mega-cap compounding type businesses.

Then wanted to go and live in Asia and look at more of the companies that got me excited when I was first working at the family office backed fund at Breezo and went back and worked for Breezo. Then that's when I had the idea eventually to start my own fund, which I launched in May of Turton and it's focused globally with a global mandate, but really zooming in on the markets that I think where they're going through corporate governance reform cycles. It's bottoms up equity investing paired with a top-down focus on these markets where I think when you really isolate why stocks are cheap and it's the governance angle, and that governance is improving, you have a big pond to fish in. I'll pause there, but that's a little bit about my background and kind of what I've done over the past decade and a half.

Tobias Carlisle (3:50)

There's a few little nuggets you dropped there. What was it like working for Todd? What did you learn under him?

Ryan Albert (3:55)

I learned a lot.

I could talk about a lot of things I learned, but I would say the main focus was purely a ruthless focus on doing the qualitative research work. So I learned to appraise businesses looking at multiples a few years out, and creating a range of outcomes and really focusing on quality at that point, because then it becomes almost like a multiple debate. If you can underwrite something that's a fair to cheap multiple a few years out, then the question becomes what's a fair multiple in three, four years? And that then is a question of your market size, how fast you can grow into a management quality and aspects like that, and that becomes almost like qualitative research driven rather than just pure numbers. So very much focused on unit economics of businesses and how that might change, and the total addressable market. So it was very research heavy. It was go and just do your own research, come back with all the facts, know a lot, be able to know everything about a company, but you only truly know and you could distill it into something compact and be able to explain it in something that you can read in three to five minutes. So that sticks with me to today. Almost everything I do, I try to write in a very concise manner and try to get something that could be explained simply. So that's what I learned under Todd, but can take it in many different ways. I learned many other things, but that was I'd say the core principal focus of the things that he owned and what I focused on.