David Senra is an animal and I love his podcast, “Founders.” Senra is authentically enthusiastic about studying historically significant founders and his pursuit makes me recall Charlie Munger’s thoughts on this process.
“I make friends with the eminent dead.” – Charlie Munger
The Founders podcast consists of Senra reading a biography of a founder, analyzing, discussing key takeaways and connecting the similarities across founders. If you are a founder and not listening, I would humbly suggest your competition is listening and getting ahead.
I have known of music producer Rick Rubin but I have never studied him until he was featured on Founders, which prompted me to read his biography by Jake Brown, “In the Studio.” Rubin is a top 5 producer of all time with the most diverse set of artists from Adele to Beastie Boys to Danzig to Jay-Z to Tom Petty.
Rick Rubin’s methods have several practical applications to investing and designing investment advisory services but in the spirit of TLDR, I will only focus on authenticity.
Rubin is not focused on externalities or FOPO (Fear of Other People’s Opinions – thank you Michael Gervais). In fact, I would argue his approach with artists is to remove the thought of external influence or pressure. Investing is no different. For Rubin, he creates music that resonates with him instead of solely chasing what he thinks might be a hit. Similarly, excellence in investing is hard and if you are focused on what other people think would be a sound investment strategy, you are making it more difficult. This can be further illuminated when the investment strategy has a temporary setback, as all do. To stick to a plan, it needs to be your plan with your research and your conviction. As David Ogilvy says, “search the parks, you’ll find no statues of committees” (hat tip to Senra & Buffett for leading me to read Ogilvy!).
Authenticity at an investment advisory firm results in an experience that is unique to our founder and this approach is our biggest point of competitive differentiation. At Essential Partners, this is rooted in client partnership, transparency, continuous improvement and investment rigor. We provide services in the manner we would like to receive them, not how the industry does it (opaque, illusive, sale-sy, mis-aligned, chauffer knowledge, etc.).
Back to Rubin…do you think Johnny Cash felt comfortable recording “Hurt” at 70 years old at Rubin’s suggestion? “Hurt” deals with themes of regret and loss and Cash was grappling with his own mortality. Instead of ignoring Cash’s discomfort, Rubin encouraged him to embrace his authentic vulnerability so Cash could express himself honestly. The result was external validation through multiple awards as outcomes follows a process rooted in authenticity.
Our approach at Essential Partners seeks to learn from icons like Rick Rubin to serve our client partners by tapping into our authentic points of differentiation.