Rick Buhrman and Paul Buser - Find Your X, Nurture Your N

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:10)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and founding partner of PositiveSum and 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 PositiveSum or 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 PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:42)
My guests this week are Rick Buhrman and Paul Buser. Rick and Paul spent over a decade managing the public equity portfolio at Notre Dame's Endowment before leaving in 2020 to set up a permanent capital vehicle called Sator Grove. As you'll hear in this conversation, they know, have studied or have invested with most of the world's best capital allocators. A few years ago, they also set up a class at Notre Dame for 40 of the college's brightest students called the Art of Investing. The class is devoted to exploring the joys of compounding and each week they bring in a world-class investor or operator to share in detail how they built their lives, portfolios and businesses around the principles of compounding.
I've been so enamored by their class that earlier this year I asked them if they'd open up the class so that more people could benefit from it. I'm delighted to say that they've agreed and starting next week, it will be available as a podcast so that you too will be able to join their class and learn from the likes of Todd Combs, Andre Perold, Ho Nam and many others. The trailer is linked to today's show notes and I'd encourage you to search Art of Investing in your podcast player now and subscribe so you do not miss the first episode. Now onto my great discussion with Rick and Paul.
Gentlemen, where to begin? I think our conversation today is gonna be, for the audience, a sort of first and unfair inside look at the world of institutional investing and the alignment of incentives, which I think everyone understands, like the principal agent problem and how pervasive that is in all things, but especially in investing and how you've thought about what an investment company firm should look like.
And you have a total unfair perspective because you've met all the worlds and worked with all or most of the world's great investment managers. You are one yourself now, we'll obviously tell the Sator Grove story in some detail, but maybe the fun place to begin for me, because I don't think I've ever asked you guys this specifically, is to go back to like the moment that comes to mind when you think about your transition between a very long career helping run Notre Dame's Endowment to the first days of Sator Grove. And just talk about that phase transition. We were with somebody yesterday that's going through an extreme version of this. I'd love to hear about yours, especially Rick, because I think you said before we hit record that your intention was that you were gonna be at this one place at Notre Dame, probably for your whole career, and then things change. And so I just wanna zoom in on that moment and have you tell us about what it was like before I get into all my nitty gritty questions about investing.

**Rick Buhrman** (4:17)
We will do that. I think before doing that though, I do think it's important to set the context of just how important Notre Dame has been to the two of us. And really our story and our friendship, how we see the world, how we think about investing, really all comes back to this connective tissue that is Notre Dame. When I recruited Paul back during the financial crisis, I was just finishing up his dual degree MBA and also getting a degree in public policy.