Lydia Jett - Investing in E-commerce

**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** (1:43)
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** (2:08)
My guest today is Lydia Jett, managing partner of SoftBank Investment Advisers.
Lydia leads the team's consumer internet and e-commerce investments and has worked with many of the most significant consumer platforms in the world, including as a board member of Coupang and Flipkart. We cover all aspects of e-commerce and explore Lydia's evolution as an investor alongside Masa Son at SoftBank.
Please enjoy my conversation with Lydia Jett. Lydia, I've been really looking forward to doing this with you for a few months now. I know we've moved it around once or twice. Maybe to begin, it would be helpful to just sort of introduce you to the audience. You've got a really interesting set of background and growth equity now with SoftBank. Maybe you could describe what has united every major career stop that you've had so far. Or another way of asking the question is what curiosity thread have you been pulling on thus far in your career?

**Lydia Jett** (3:00)
First, thank you for having me. I started listening to this a couple of years ago and have found it just to be incredibly informative as to how people think and the random walks we've been on. I'll address the question in terms of what linear path is driven where I am with a little bit more of a admission that's been a little bit of a random walk. I've spent my entire career in finance that was haphazard. I graduated from college knowing nothing and having no particular connections and really struggled to figure out how to land in a place that felt fulfilling. Took me a year post college to land, but I ended up at JP. Morgan right in the back half of The Last Crisis back in 2002 And I felt really lucky to be there. Was on the capital market side of the business focused on debt capital markets and really understanding capital structure and risk and how do companies optimize how they structure and fund their businesses. And after a couple of years, I had the opportunity to go lean into the investing world and launched into investing in 2005 and have been here ever since. I spent about a decade focused on more private equity style investing. That really is understanding the risk factors of the business because fundamental growth of the underlying assets isn't big enough to support big misses relative to the debt that you have on the balance sheet.
I take a step back and I look at that period of time and it was 100 page decks talking about all the potential risks that businesses might run into and how we get comfortable that we have mediated those risks.
In 2015, when I leapt over to join the SoftBank platform, first as a member of the SoftBank group investing team, which was seven of us launching the very first growth equity efforts. In many ways, I felt like a wild place that I just couldn't understand. I'd had a decade teaching me that you had to be really disciplined and focused on downside. And all of a sudden I ended up in an organization where you really had to do the opposite, which was just make sure that you had tailwinds driving your business and then identify the couple of big things that had to go right to win. And that transition took a while. I will admit, I think I called my husband my first night at SoftBank and I said, I'm not sure I can do this. The methodology, the style of thinking is just so different from how I've grown up and where my head sits.