Nico Wittenborn - Finding the Adjacent Possible

**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** (1:59)
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**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:28)
My guest today is Nico Wittenborn. Nico is the founder of Adjacent, a venture firm that looks for what he describes as the adjacent possible for their next investment. Nico has zoned in on the consumer subscription market as his ideal candidates, making early investments in Calm, Photoroom and Oura Ring. Nico does virtually all steps of the investment process on his own, as he believes this allows him to be as close to finding the truth as possible. We discuss sharpening your intuition, evaluating the subscription business model and exploring the adjacent possible. Please enjoy this conversation with Nico Wittenborn.
So Nico, I think a fun place to begin our conversation would be a lesson you learned, I think from Brian Singerman, about how to learn as an investor.

**Nico Wittenborn** (3:11)
For sure. Brian, as you know, has strong opinions and I think is pretty good at seeing the quintessential point of any specific topic. And I actually asked him for advice from an investor point of view, but I think the answer he gave was the advice that he would also give a founder that he's working with. And it was essentially, I had a situation where I had to make a decision on an investment. I was already an investor. There was an opportunity to do a larger follow-on investment pretty quickly after the initial investment. And I asked him for some advice around that and he essentially just, I have no idea what you're talking about with the company, but I would just trust my instinct because the only way that you can learn based on this decision is if you actually follow your own intuition instead of taking somebody else's advice. And I think that makes a lot of sense if you think about, if you get the advice that essentially is the right decisions, then you outsource the judgment and you don't really take anything away from it.
And if you make the wrong decision, you have frustration because you listen to somebody else.
So I think that this key insight there was just trying to look within and sharpen your intuition and instinct versus trying to externalize the decision-making, which I think is a really good approach long-term if you want to evolve your own unique perspective that only you hold, which I think is probably the foundation for becoming a great investor in the long-term.