Marc Lasry - Making Bucks in Credit and Sports

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
This episode is brought to you by Tegus, the only research platform built for fundamental investors. How hard do you work to get the insights you need to make a great investment decision? How many hours do you spend digging through public records and expert transcripts or manually updating complex models? Investors should compete on their ability to analyze investments, not how well they aggregate data. That's why Tegus offers a unified end-to-end research platform that combines robust qualitative content sets, up-to-date financial data, management and culture checks and more, all in the same easy-to-use, streamlined user experience. 95% of the top 20 global private equity firms use Tegus. Shouldn't you? Learn more and get your free trial at tegus.com/patrick.
You may have heard me reference the idea of maniacs on a mission and how much that idea excites me. Well, David Senra is my favorite maniac on one of my favorite missions with his weekly crafting of the Founders Podcast. Through studying the lives of legends, he weaves together insights across history to distill ideas that you can use in your work.
Founders reveals tried and true tactics, battle-tested by the world's icons and has David's infectious energy to accompany them. With well over 300 episodes, your heroes are surely in the lineup and his recent episode on Oprah is particularly great. Founders is a movement that you don't want to miss. It's part of the Colossus Network and you can find your way to David's great podcast in the show notes.
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** (1:53)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of PositiveSum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum.
This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit p-s-u-m dot v-c.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:22)
My guest this week is Marc Lasry. Marc is a pioneer of Distress Debt Investing and the CEO of Avenue Capital Group, which he co-founded with his sister in 1995
Avenue manages $13 billion today. More recently, Marc and Avenue have become active investors in sports. He owned the Milwaukee Bucks when they won the NBA Championship in 2021 and has since made investments in sports as diverse as sailing and bull riding. In our discussion, we talk about his journey building a big investing firm, the evolution of distressed investing and the opportunities in sports today. Marc shares some great stories throughout about traveling with President Clinton, winning the NBA Championship and raising his first fund. Please enjoy this great conversation with Marc Lasry.
What's the earliest episode you can remember of feeling like a sense of confidence and competence in what you were doing?

**Marc Lasry** (3:14)
Oh, wow, that's a great question. That's actually fascinating. I've never really thought about that. I think part of it is I always grew up, I had a mom who always told me you could do anything. So I just grew up believing I could do anything.
I don't think there was a moment when I thought, oh, wow, I could do this.
I think when we left Morocco, we came to the United States, everything was about education. Everything was about learning because we didn't really have any money. So the only way you were going to go to school was by scholarship. I think it was a belief that my parents instilled in me.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:50)
So not fueled by self-doubt? Well, it's funny because a lot of people are in your position, I would say.

**Marc Lasry** (4:00)
No, I don't think so.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (4:02)
Both the GSP guys and Ali Hamed told me to ask you about the story of raising your first fund.

**Marc Lasry** (4:09)
It all depends on an investor, Gustave Léve, who actually founded Perrier. When he came in here, he was about 75 years old, and he comes in, and back then he had a Kodak and Stamatic, and he's taking pictures of the people who work for me, taking pictures of the office, and I was like, oh, okay, and everybody's like modeling, and we're all standing there doing whatever we're doing, and he literally took 24 pictures.
And at the end, I was like, okay, so why is that? He goes, oh, I just like to have pictures of my investors. I was like, okay, and he goes, but I'll come back in three or six months, and that's when I'll decide if I'm gonna invest, and he comes back, and he's got the pictures with him, and he goes, I wanna just make sure same people are here. I was like, okay, yeah, they all are. I go, so I don't understand, and he goes, well, sometimes people just would have actors come in, and I just wanna make sure it's the same.