Nikhil Kalghatgi – Moonshot Investing

**SPEAKER_2** (0:24)
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** (0:59)
My guest this week helps me complete the first trilogy of guests on the podcast. His name is Nikhil Kalghatgi.
Along with past guests, Ali Hamed and Savneet Singh, Nikhil is a partner at the asset management firm CoVenture. If you liked those two conversations, you'll love this one. It is somehow even more wide ranging than the first two.
Nikhil is the CEO of CoVenture Crypto, but he ended up there because of an overarching investing style that he calls Moonshot Investing, which we explore right from the start and in great detail.
He is obsessed with productivity and happiness, and we spend a long time on those two topics. One of the most interesting experiments I've heard about on the podcast is his Happiness Project, for which he interviewed more than 100 of the wealthiest people in the world. The lessons he gleaned from those conversations are very helpful, and I won't soon forget the lesson related to sacrifice. We also discuss asteroid mining, networking, shared experience and philosophy. Oh, and cryptocurrencies. Nikhil's take on crypto has always been refreshing to me. In fact, the first time I met him, he was throwing cold water on a room full of enthusiastic crypto investors. Within crypto, we discuss business opportunities, mining, and how new retail and institutional capital will affect the asset class. Like the Hashpower documentary, this episode and other Hashpower singles are brought to you by Fidelity Investments, a company that is constantly researching and experimenting with emerging technologies like crypto assets and blockchain to improve the lives of their customers. Fidelity provides a comprehensive set of products and services to individual investors, employers, and financial advisory firms. For more information, please visit fidelity.com. Please enjoy this sparkling conversation with Nikhil Kalghatgi.

**Nikhil Kalghatgi** (2:32)
Bye.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:42)
So Nikhil, we're gonna start with Moonshot Investing. You mentioned this as we were just chatting before we hit record. Maybe you could describe what that term means, and we'll get into some of the nuanced detail around. How one might go about assessing whether or not something has Moonshot potential?

**Nikhil Kalghatgi** (2:56)
Moonshots are pretty much the biggest idea you can possibly muster. And everyone's Moonshots are different than someone else's, so it's not like you're limited to actually being Elon Musk or trying to go to Mars or whatever it is. It is, in my experience, the best gift you can give to an entrepreneur is to expand their mind and their goals and what they can achieve. This has happened to me when volunteering at intercity schools, teaching entrepreneurship, to being a VC, and the best thing that I tried to do when I spent the last eight plus years as a venture capitalist was ask entrepreneurs sort of what their moonshot really is with their company. Not the vision of their current company, but what they're really trying to achieve in the five or 10 year kind of horizon.
And even if it's a really remote possibility, if that's what I could do to focus on helping them achieve their vision, then I've really found my edge in helping them succeed. So the reason I focus on moonshots is because honestly, logically, it's the place where I thought I could be everyone else. Because a company that's going forward on, I don't know, asteroid mining, that's like one example of a company that I've actually invested in. Now that sounds like their moonshot is pretty close to what the literal definition of a moonshot is.
But, you know, in the context of being a good investor, it might be something like changing the law could be something that I could do that would be my moonshot within the scope of them. It could be getting Obama on their advisory board. And then all of a sudden, I figured out what my moonshot alignment is with their business. So actually moonshot is really an investment strategy, not like a sector.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (4:41)
Say more about why that's an advantage. So that's not even really a term. I mean, it's a term obviously I've heard many times, but never talked about on the show. And I'm always fascinated by what creates a sustainable differentiated investment advantage, even if it's just like a niche. And this feels kind of like a niche, like you don't hear people focused on this.