Ravi Gupta - Focus

**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** (1:44)
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** (2:10)
My guest today is Ravi Gupta. Ravi spent a decade in private equity at KKR before joining Instacart as their first CFO and COO. He navigated them through a critical moment in their history and returned to investing in 2019 as a partner at Sequoia.
Our discussion gets to the heart of what it means to build and invest in great businesses. And we talk a lot about the personal side of the journey, which tends to get overlooked. Please enjoy this great conversation with Ravi Gupta.
So where to begin this conversation? I think our favorite idea that you and I talk about all the time is this beautiful, elegant sentence, keep the main thing, the main thing.
People have heard this before. I'm sure that people like the idea at its surface level. I'd love to spend the first part of this conversation really convincing people that this is an idea worth holding dear and taking very seriously. I personally made this mistake to not keep the main thing, the main thing so many times I can't even count. And I've regretted it every time. It seems like one of those lessons you can only learn by firsthand experience, but we're gonna do our best to really ram this point home. So give me your opening salvo on this beautiful idea and why you take it so seriously.

**Ravi Gupta** (3:19)
I believe it with all of my heart. First thing I'll start with is some quote or something I think I got from Johnny Ive reading it. It's not focus or prioritization until it's painful. And so I think the first thing I'm like, keep the main thing, the main thing. People say they believe it, but then they have, well, what's the main thing? And well, there's five of them. It's like, nope, you have already violated it. And so for me, the lesson is learned through pain. It's learned through working at Instacart and us having five goals that we tell the company that we wanna work on.
And everyone being so happy because we have five goals and everyone has one of the goals appeals to every single person in the organization. And the day that you present the goals that we're going to work on is a great day because everyone's energized. But then three months later, the day that you go and present how you did on those five goals is a terrible day because you make no progress or middling progress on them. Or even worse, really good progress on two of them that don't matter and no progress on the one that does.
And so the lesson for me is simply this, when you don't do that, you don't get done the most important thing. And as a result, what ends up happening is you value activity over progress on the key thing. And I realize now that it's just simply the pain of actually going through it first and having the hard conversation with someone of, I understand that that is important for you. It is not the most important thing that we need to do for the business. And we will get to that. But we will get to that after we finish this thing that has to be done.