Loading summary
Transcript195 lines
- [00:01]
Hannah Frei
Enterprises are busy embracing the technologies that underpin Industry 4.0, such as AI and automation. But now the fifth industrial revolution is coming. So what is it and what could it mean for our jobs? I'm Hannah Frei. You can learn more later in the podcast.
- [00:16]
Bloomberg Ad
What could you do if your data was working for you and not against you? With Bloomberg delivering enterprise data directly to your systems, you get easy access to the details you want optimized for higher level analysis and financial experts committed to helping you maximize your every move. Our data is made for more so you can show the world what you're made of. Visit bloomberg.comenterprisedata to learn more.
- [00:47]
Hannah Frei
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News.
- [00:55]
David Roux
This.
- [00:55]
Barry Ritholtz
Is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.
- [01:02]
David Roux
This week on the podcast, another extra special guest. David Rue is chairman of Bapine, a fascinating private equity firm. They are not interested in simply flipping companies or buying firms and then quickly selling them what they do. Much more involved than a consulting firm. They are experts at digital transformation across a wide variety of sectors in the investing world. And they essentially take companies as varied as tire manufacturers and industrial producers and retailers and find intelligent ways to use technology to make these companies more efficient, more productive, more profitable. And they're not, again, they're not just consultants. They come in, they take a stake in a company. Sometimes it's a minor stake, sometimes it's a larger stake and they help effect this massive change with great results. They're one of the few companies that specialize in this. Their track record has been very impressive and the approach they bring to transforming old industry companies is absolutely fascinating. Previous to Bine, David was one of the co founders of Silver Lake Investors.
- [02:36]
Barry Ritholtz
A legendary firm from the 90s and 2000s. With no further ado, my conversation with.
- [02:43]
David Roux
Bapines David Roux, thank you.
- [02:46]
Pleasure to be here.
- [02:47]
It's a pleasure to have you.
- [02:47]
Barry Ritholtz
I've been looking forward to this conversation for quite a while. Let's start out with your background. Bachelor's from Harvard, Master's in philosophy from Cambridge, and then an MBA from Harvard Business School. What was the career plan?
- [03:02]
David Roux
You know, I originally wanted to be an architect.
- [03:05]
Barry Ritholtz
Really? I've always wanted to pretend to be an architect. That's, that's an area I'm fascinated. And why did you not go into that space?
- [03:13]
David Roux
You know, I grew up, you know, building go karts and tree houses and the like. But I think when I got to school I found that I could make models, build software, maybe create organizations, and that it was as much Fun as building a building.
- [03:41]
Barry Ritholtz
There's a different sense of creating a company versus creating a certain type of space inhabited by people. No doubt about that. So let's talk about some of those companies that you built. You begin at a few tech startups. You found daytechs, which eventually gets acquired by Lotus. What was the startup process like? This was mid-1980s, is that about right?
- [04:06]
David Roux
Yeah, early 80s. You know, in business school I realized this is the kind of early PC boom. And I realized from my academic work, you know, there were word processors, there were spreadsheets, but there was not very good database technology for PCs. They didn't have what the mini computers had and the mainframes had. So I saw an opportunity to create some software and also to be able to marry that up with data for people to use on their PCs. And that was the idea behind Datext.
- [04:49]
Barry Ritholtz
So Datext gets acquired by Lotus, who eventually acquires Lotus.
- [04:53]
David Roux
Lotus is eventually acquired by IBM, by coincidence. That was a relationship I managed. So I had a very good kind of ringside seat and all that. They were very interested in the company's suite of Primarily Communications Technologies, ccMail, Lotus notes, because the sort of networking boom had already started up and they saw a world where all of these PCs would be interconnected.
- [05:22]
Barry Ritholtz
How did you end up at Oracle?
- [05:24]
David Roux
I had met Larry Ellison during my Lotus days. I'd done another company which we sold to Symantec. Larry had contacted me and said, look, we've got a tiger by the tail. The business is growing like crazy. I think there might be some M and A opportunities. We really don't have a corporate development function. Would you be interested to come here and build one? That's how it happened.
- [05:49]
Barry Ritholtz
Oracle, especially in the 80s and 90s, became famous as a serial acquirer of all sorts of pieces. Spin outs, roll ups. How long did you stay at Oracle?
- [06:00]
David Roux
I was there all through the 90s till 1999. You know, it was really a terrific experience. Extremely rapid growth. I ran the venture fund, did all the investing off the balance sheet. I also managed our. Started and managed the M and A program. So, yeah, it was fantastic.
- [06:18]
Barry Ritholtz
Yeah, I can imagine. Oracle in the 90s, you were out in California, I'm gonna assume, right.
- [06:23]
David Roux
Silicon Valley.
- [06:24]
Barry Ritholtz
Right. Right in the heart of things.
- [06:26]
David Roux
Ground zero.
- [06:26]
Barry Ritholtz
And I gotta think Oracle and Ellison like I cut my teeth on them. In the 90s, he seemed to have been everywhere. Oracle was consistently ranked best company to work, top 10 fasting, growing companies like Oracle. I think people who just came into the market in the past 1020 years. Don't know what a powerhouse Oracle was and still is.
- [06:50]
David Roux
Yeah, it has a remarkable history. You know IT class of 86, meaning that's the same year as Microsoft, Sun, Apple. And so they've been at it and doing a great job for a while. You know, Larry's often thought of as a very aggressive and astute business mind. But I don't think he gets enough credit for his technical chops. If you look back, think about it, he has been fearless about betting the company on major new architecture. So you know, he made the original bet around relational databases when everyone else was doing something else. He then made a major bet on Unix when it was a kind of obscure scientific operating system. He then made a huge bet around enterprise applications, big bet around client server. And then maybe the most courageous bet was in the mid-90s when Netscape had gotten the first browsers out. The Internet boom had started a great story. He came in one morning after a weekend, we all sat down at our little executive committee call and he says, look, I've been thinking, I think this Internet thing is more important than most people understand. I would like to change 100% of what we're doing in development. I want to stop all of the client server work and I want to re platform everything that we're doing on a web architecture. 3,000 engineers, dozens, hundreds of products affecting thousands upon thousands of customers. And he very casually said, and I'd like to do this by the end of the day.
- [08:42]
Barry Ritholtz
Sounds like that's a multi year project. Was he talking about a plan or was he talking about.
- [08:47]
David Roux
No, no, no, he was talking about I want, I want this done. He turned to the director of engineering and said I want this done by the end of the day.
- [08:53]
Barry Ritholtz
Just port it over to the.
- [08:54]
David Roux
We're just going to stop. We're not going to write another line of client server code. It's done. This is going to be the new architecture. This is the future of computing. This is what our customers are going to want in two and three and five years time. So we need to start building it now for it to be ready then it was really the thing. I mean just a credibly gutsy bet, but a very good sense of his technical prowess and the confidence he had about the kind of what's coming next part.
- [09:25]
Barry Ritholtz
Huh. Sounds like Oracle was quite an experience at the end of the 1990s. You co found Silver Lake in 1999. What led to that? You were at Oracle. You were like a 15 year veteran at Oracle. Is that about Right?
- [09:41]
David Roux
No, not quite. But I'd been there a while and it was, you know, a fantastic experience. I had a great job, really good relationship with Larry, rest of the team. You know, I was my late 30s. I'd kind of come to realize that it was always going to be Larry's business, rightly so, and that I was looking around and I saw what I thought of, as I've come to call it, an OIPs, which is acronym OIPs for an opportunity in Plain Sight. And I couldn't understand the following. I couldn't understand why investors were pouring money into venture firms, pouring money into growth equity and not doing anything to invest in technology using a private equity format didn't make sense to me that it would be a good small company, it would be a good medium sized company, and then all of a sudden it would not be an appropriate place for fiduciary capital. That didn't make sense. And I thought, gosh, that must be a huge opportunity. You know, we were right in the middle of the Internet boom, so tech was, you know, front and center of the news and yet there was none of the, you know, traditional firms were there. In fact, they were actively avoiding it. You know, it was sort of not considered an appropriate place to invest that kind of capital.
- [11:03]
Barry Ritholtz
Why was that? Was it that people were just so distracted by new hotness, by the dot coms and the Internet or.
- [11:10]
David Roux
I don't think so.
- [11:11]
Barry Ritholtz
Or were the public markets there for larger companies if they needed capital?
- [11:16]
David Roux
No, no, I don't think that. Here's what I think, because this is what they told us. I mean, I asked that exact question. The theory was this. You couldn't go write checks for hundreds of millions of dollars if you couldn't underwrite the technical innovation at the heart of these business models. If you didn't understand how the semiconductor worked, if you didn't understand how the software was built. One, two. There was a theory that these businesses had volatile cash flows and therefore couldn't be leveraged, which was the, you know, the whole point of leverage, buyouts. And finally, that they were companies run by children, young folks. I was in the business and when I heard all that, I said, you know those guys in New York and the skyscrapers and the guy in London and those people in Munich and Tokyo, I don't think they really know what's going on here. These are actually really good businesses. The cash flows are unbelievable. Customer franchises are very, very durable. There's incredible organic growth here. This is a really big and attractive opportunity. I think someone's going to make a great return by building a business here.
- [12:30]
Barry Ritholtz
And you don't need to underwrite the entire underlying technology. You're really just talking about that transition to whatever makes those companies that much more attractive. Is that a fair assessment?
- [12:44]
David Roux
When you're doing what Silver Lake does and what it was built to do, you are making a fundamental bet technology. It's like when people buy technology or enter into an agreement with a company like an Oracle or a Microsoft. You're not buying what they're selling you today. You're buying the promise that they will continue delivering. It's like buying a lot on a river. Now you're not buying the water in front of your house. You're buying the promise that the water will continue to flow. You do need to have a point of view about how well positioned these companies are for the future you co.
- [13:23]
Barry Ritholtz
Found Silver Lake with. This is some lineup. Glenn Hutchins, Jim Davidson, Roger McNamee. Tell us about your Silver Lake co founders.
- [13:33]
David Roux
Well, look, they're each enormously talented and capable in their own right. You know, we all live near each other, knew each other professionally beforehand. We talked extensively about this opportunity and agreed that it was the next big thing. And I think that, you know, looking back on it, I've been very fortunate at Silver Lake and prior companies when I started something to do it with a group of people and that it's always been great to have folks from different backgrounds, different styles, different professional experience. You know, it's very complimentary and you know, it's not for everybody but for me it's, it's the way I like to do business.
- [14:16]
Barry Ritholtz
They weren't at Oracle prior. How did the.
- [14:20]
David Roux
How do we all know each other? Yeah, Glenn and I have been college classmates, tennis partners, fly fishing buddies. He was previously at Blackstone. Jim Davidson and I are both big sports fans and shared season tickets for the Sharks and the Warriors. So we would spend a lot of time together. He was running the H and Q investment bank and then Roger was my next door neighbor and very good friends with Jim. So you know, it was a group of people who already kind of knew each other, had some personal relationships to build on and you know, came with a different set of experiences.
- [15:01]
Barry Ritholtz
What was Silver lake like in 2000 as the dot coms all imploded?
- [15:06]
David Roux
Well, you know, it was an interesting thing. I would jokingly tell people that we bought high, sold low and made a ton of money and you know, it was a very challenging economic environment. The NASDAQ during that period fell 80% right? Over and over from the front end of the fund to the back. The fund itself, in a very fundamental way, was set up as a counterpoint to the mania around the Internet. And what we would tell people pointedly, we say, look, you're completely right to be excited about the technology sector. It's underinvested, it's underappreciated for its scale, it's underappreciated for its growth. It's underappreciated for the strategic value that it plays in the economy. But you're investing in the wrong companies at the wrong price. And I had a little chart that I would show them. Say, here's approximately 1,000 public company, public tech companies at that time. These 10% are what's driving the entire valuation. They're trading at 10 to 30 plus times revenue, not earnings revenue, not earnings revenue. And I said, I can just tell you that is the wrong price. Not necessarily bad companies, but those are the wrong prices. I said, but look at these other 90%. If you take the rest of the publicly traded technology companies, they trade at one times revenue, which is the same as the S and P of the day, pretty reasonable, more or less very reasonable. And they grow twice as fast. So you have an opportunity to buy growth at half price. You've got this situation. There's sort of the fundamental insight at the heart of the Silver Lake value proposition is that technology, the entire tech sector was on sale even at a time when people thought it was super expensive, because 10% of the market was super expensive, but most of it was not.
- [17:13]
Barry Ritholtz
How much of what's been going on in the 2020s has been a focus on that same top 10% of tech companies as being overly concentrated and wildly expensive. Do you think the same situation is starting to show up in the modern era?
- [17:31]
David Roux
Well, there are some parallels and also some important differences. The parallels are that there is a concentration of interest. The difference is those companies are now huge businesses with gigantic levels of profitability, unprecedented levels of profitability and growth rates that have never been achieved before by companies at that scale. So that's the part that's really different. Right. A lot of the things in Internet time was highly speculative. The other thing that's different is that today the companies with the most spectacular valuation levels are private. People aren't wrong to say they are a winner. The sort of the bet, of course, is, are they the only winner? Right. And so you have to believe that there won't be successful competition. You know, I would only point out that 40% of their sales go to four big vendors.
- [18:44]
Barry Ritholtz
Right.
- [18:45]
David Roux
Each of whom has their own chip development program. And so I'm not saying they're going to build a better chip, but they're definitely going to build a cheaper chip. And so there'll be some dampening for sure from that.
- [18:59]
Barry Ritholtz
And you know, I'm around long enough to remember when it looked like intel was impregnable, that they had a position in the ecosystem that nobody could touch. And now it feels like they're an also Rand.
- [19:15]
David Roux
Well, this goes back to the point that you raised earlier, which is if you're going to do tech investing, you need to have an opinion about the tech. It's not just that you can look at a series of financials and say, oh, they had a good quarter last quarter, they had good year over year numbers, I like the three year trend and say, fine, you have to separately underwrite the quality of the underlying architecture, what's going on in the industry and believe that they're going to be able to keep going. And so like, if you like go to Nvidia, let's talk about that. You can look at the financials and say this is fantastic. You know, they're doubling and trebling and these are incredible numbers and growth and blah, blah, blah. The way they have gotten their improvements has been to go beyond what has been possible in any other chip manufacturer. The other chip manufacturers have gotten their productivity improvements around the physical geometry by making the chip smaller and smaller. More transistors, more and more transistors. Moore's law, the classic Moore's Law, down.
- [20:24]
Barry Ritholtz
To ever smaller, ever smaller. Right, right.
- [20:28]
David Roux
These guys have got, have stolen a march on the rest of the industry with their GPU chips. By doing other things. They've gotten probably two or two and a half times, which is a lot of improvement. But they're talking about improvements of things that are kind of 8, 10, 12, 16 times productivity improvement. So they're doing it other ways. They're doing it with algorithms, they're doing it with other approaches. And so you have to form an opinion as an investor about what is the likelihood they can keep doing that because it's been the key driver and.
- [21:06]
Barry Ritholtz
Keep doing that for the next three to five years, not just the next quarter.
- [21:10]
David Roux
Bingo.
- [21:11]
Hannah Frei
They say that the fifth Industrial revolution is about human centricity, about building technology to enhance our abilities and productivity. But previous revolutions haven't exactly been kind to ordinary workers. Can this one really be any different? Can we build a more utopian view of the future while respecting the forces of industry. I'm Hannah Frei, host of the Exponential Era, and I got to sit down with an expert at Nokia Bell Labs to ask these questions. Find out their answers@bloomberg.com Nokia.
- [21:42]
Matt Levine
Are you looking for a new podcast about stuff related to money?
- [21:46]
David Roux
Well, today's your lucky day.
- [21:48]
Matt Levine
I'm Matt Levine.
- [21:49]
David Roux
And I'm Katie Greifeld.
- [21:51]
Matt Levine
And we are the hosts of Money Stuff, the podcast. Every Friday, we dive into the top stories about Wall street finance and other stuff.
- [21:59]
David Roux
We have fun, we get weird, and we want you to join us.
- [22:02]
Matt Levine
You can listen to Money Stuff the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [22:11]
Barry Ritholtz
So let's talk a little bit about Silver Lake and how that eventually leads to Bapine. It feels like, and I don't know if my memory is correct, Silver Lake was one of the first buyout shops built around making technology investments or investments in technology companies. Is that a fair description?
- [22:32]
David Roux
Several other deals had been done, but they were occasional and they weren't the central focus for anyone.
- [22:39]
Barry Ritholtz
Tell us some of your memorable investments at Silver Lake.
- [22:43]
David Roux
Well, I think some of the investments that the firm is best known for out of the box. First was Seagate, which was a hard disk drive manufacturer. It was at the time the number one producer of disk drives. They had the best technology, great management team, very complex but finely crafted extended supply chain through Asia and Wall street hated them. It was hardware in the age of the Internet. So the other thing that traded really, really hot back then was any new telecom business, right? Optical this, telecom that. One of the insights that we had as a group, and it stemmed from the fact that we were not finance people, but industry people with operating backgrounds, is we understood that the entire tech industry is an ecosystem, right? It operates like your body, right? All the parts sort of need to fit together and they operate interdependently. And so everybody at that time was talking about the information superhighway and they were buying the highway, right? They're buying the telecom companies and they were buying all these new applications that you could do on the Internet. But people forgot that you couldn't have an information superhighway without parking lots. In other words, the electron, the bit had to start somewhere and it needed to end somewhere. So if you believed that broadband was going to explode, then you must also believe that storage is going to explode. And so we were able to look at that kind of systemic arbitrage around the architecture and say, you know, the comms piece is overpriced. I don't think we should pay 10 and 15 times for a pipe when we can pay six times EBITDA. EBITDA earnings for the number one storage company in the world. Now, there was a bunch of complications around things they owned and it was a public company, so it was a leveraged buyout and all the rest of that. But that was really the fundamental insight.
- [24:55]
Barry Ritholtz
So it sounds like a lot of the public market investors had a fundamental misunderstanding about the entire tech sector, the ecosystem as you described it. What other things did people just not get, not understand, Overlook obvious investments in plain sight?
- [25:15]
David Roux
Yeah, well, I think in that case it was a hangover from the very real war of attrition that for the prior 20 years had preceded that moment in time where the industry went from 120 disk drive companies to six or seven.
- [25:37]
Barry Ritholtz
You had an idea who the winners were going to be.
- [25:39]
David Roux
Well, and so the question was, is there going to be more blood in the water or have we arrived at an industry structure where everybody is going to do okay and the number one player is probably going to do better than most? That was one. The second issue is, could anyone figure out a way to. At the time, Seagate owned some shares and other software companies and it wasn't clear to the market how they could sell those in a tax efficient way. And that's one of the things that with structuring we were able to figure out. I'll give you another one where we bought Avago, Hewlett Packard's semiconductor division. In this time frame, the early 2000s, it was very much the fashion to be out of semis. Semis were out of fashion.
- [26:34]
Barry Ritholtz
Right.
- [26:34]
David Roux
The world was infatuated with the other end of the stack, not the, you know, I didn't want to hear it. People didn't want to hear about semis. They didn't want to hear about sub assemblies, they didn't want to hear about components. They didn't want to hear about computers. They wanted to hear about all the sexy high margin, no cost of goods, no capital equipment, software services, Internet applications. Sounded wonderful. This is the age of pets.com? that thing. And so it wasn't wrong to say that software was good, but it didn't automatically follow that hardware is bad. And so people had this idea, almost like a dialectic, which is that you couldn't believe in something that you like, the other must be bad. And so semis were completely out of fashion. Siemens spun theirs off. HP spun theirs off. IBM either closed or spun theirs off. You know, Just all these people who had, who had very significant capabilities and fabs that today would be worth fortunes. Leave aside the intellectual property and the skill sets and the trained labor force all went off the back of the truck. So we bought this from hp, hired a great manager CEO named Hock Tan, and built this up into a kind of highly specialized. In other words, we didn't buy it with the idea that we're going to go compete with intel and try to dislodge them from the PC market, but rather with the idea that everything was going to have a processor, cars, kids toys, your kitchen appliances, and that somebody was going to have to make all those processors. And so there was an exploding rest of market opportunity that intel wasn't focused on, that people like Avago could be.
- [28:33]
Barry Ritholtz
Today, I think automobiles are the second.
- [28:35]
David Roux
Biggest consumer of semiconductors.
- [28:36]
Barry Ritholtz
I don't know if that's still true. That was true a few years ago.
- [28:40]
David Roux
I think that's right. In fact, the stat I often quote for people is that the semiconductor content in a car is more valuable than all of the metal, than all the steel and all the aluminum. And maybe more importantly, it is increasingly the case that what the semiconductors enable, the navigation, the ABS lane departure warning, all the features that really give the car kind of its identity are increasingly denominated by the digital capabilities.
- [29:20]
Barry Ritholtz
What about the rest of the world outside of PCs and automobiles? It was incredibly far looking to say in the early 2000s, by the way, there are going to be chips in everything. Not just dishwashers and refrigerators, but toys and electric bikes. And you name it, it's going to need a chip that was a decade ahead of its time.
- [29:43]
David Roux
You would have been very amused when we raised our first fund. You may remember the Furby Dollar. Sure, of course, which was a hot, hot product. You couldn't get it hot, kids product, little furry thing, the eyes back. And it had in it a digital signal processing chip that would allow it to make little noise, cuddly noises, and, you know, wiggle its legs. And I used to bring it with me to all of our fundraising meetings. I wouldn't say a word about it. I'd simply take it out of my briefcase and I would put it on the desk between myself and the prospective investor. I wouldn't say a word about it. You know, I'd launch into my talk about semiconductors and hardware and the evolution of the sector and so forth. And finally, sometimes it would be five minutes, sometimes 10, but it was never more than 30 minutes.
- [30:33]
Barry Ritholtz
Right.
- [30:34]
David Roux
The investor would say David, what is that doll? Why are you, why do you have that doll? There I go, oh, I'm so sorry, I forgot to mention it. That's a Furby doll. And I brought that for you because I wanted to illustrate in a simple way how the march of technology is going to go. I said, that Furby doll has more processing power than the lunar lander.
- [30:58]
Barry Ritholtz
I knew you were going to go that way.
- [30:59]
David Roux
And I said, we're looking at a world where all of music is going to be digital, all of film is going to be digital, television is going to be digital. The way you do your phone is going to be digital. I said, so all of these analog things as they become more digital, need this technology. And if you understand how the technology works, you will, not because you're kind of a big brain genius, but because you've played the game before and you understand what all the pieces do, you'll be in a really good position to identify those opportunities going forward. I'll give you another great example. The part that, and the little wrinkle that I think gave us a lot of credibility and by the way, gives us credibility now, is to say, let's own the right technology, put it in the right companies. And the key part is at the right price, it is bringing an investment sensibility and financial discipline to the work that we do. Right? We're not like technology zealots. And I want to just own it, to own it. Right? It's not a prize, it's not a trophy. It's would this be useful and would somebody else be interested? I'll give you another example. Ebay came out of the blocks super hot. They bought PayPal and then they bought this thing called Skype. And Skype was the first software based peer to peer video conferencing capability. So long before Zoom, 20, 30 million people on at the same time, which was an amazing technical feat. Wasn't exactly here what it had to do with auctions. Even less clear what it had to do with PayPal. But eBay bought Skype and it kind of noodled along in the Skype portfolio in the early 2000s for a year. Two years, no one paid any attention to it at all. We said, my gosh, look, they've had three CEOs in two years. They're spread out all over the place. They haven't upgraded the product in two years. Maybe they'd be willing to sell it. Contacted them once, contacted them twice. Eventually they said, yeah, we'd be willing to talk to you about that. Because we had a point of view about this is a really exciting market, but no one's paying any attention. So if we could carve that out, we went to ebay and said, keep as much of this as you want, we'll buy the rest of it at a full valuation. Which we did. And it was a business that had nice growth despite really being a feral child.
- [33:36]
Barry Ritholtz
Right, right.
- [33:37]
David Roux
And we said, look, get paid twice, we'll pay you once what it's worth. And we're going to make this way more valuable than you possibly could because we can focus on it and make a bunch of changes. And it was sort of a troubled, was complicated asset where, you know, there was some outstanding litigation. They hadn't upgraded it for a long time. Apple had just announced that they were going to be offering a, you know, video video Service. It became FaceTime. So there was, you know, Microsoft said they wanted to be in the business. So there was a lot of competition. There was competition from very credible large players.
- [34:13]
Barry Ritholtz
And if I recall correctly, around that time, all of the fat pipes and broad bandwidth that had come public in the late 90s, early 2000s, were coming back up around pennies on the dollar. I recall Global Crossing and Metro Meter Fiber and all these companies. So the bandwidth was coming online at a cheap price that didn't exist that way in the 90s, which is very much right into the sweet spot of Skype.
- [34:40]
David Roux
Yeah, and by the way, not so dissimilar from the AI processing crunch that we have today where people are pouring a huge amount of super expensive stuff which you do need, but which will be available three years and five years and 10 years from now, much cheaper, really, really different pricing.
- [34:59]
Barry Ritholtz
You end up buying them, if I recall correctly, not much long after that. Didn't Microsoft come along and scoop them up from you?
- [35:06]
David Roux
Well, what happened is that we bought it, completely, upgraded the software, changed out the entire management team, developed a series of partnerships, built a business side of it because it had been very much a kind of B2C phenomenon. Trying to really opened up a product line around B2B and it ended up being very attractive for Microsoft, sold it to them, one of the foundation elements in what is teams today, and really helped them. I think it was a great. It turned out to be a good deal for Silver Lake, but it also, I think, as all deals should be a very good deal for the acquirers.
- [35:45]
Barry Ritholtz
Any other memorable Silver Lake deals?
- [35:48]
David Roux
We're oftentimes, you know, I think the, maybe two others that we are well known for, we're the largest investor in Alibaba before.
- [35:57]
Barry Ritholtz
Oh really?
- [35:58]
David Roux
Before it went public. And that was a, you know, explosive.
- [36:02]
Barry Ritholtz
That was job.
- [36:03]
David Roux
That was explosive. But it was a scary investment. It was a minority investment in a Chinese e commerce company, you know, located on the other side of the world.
- [36:13]
Barry Ritholtz
Who'S also your co, your co investor is the People's Republic of China, right? They own a chunk.
- [36:19]
David Roux
Ultimate regulator for sure.
- [36:22]
Barry Ritholtz
Owner slash regulator.
- [36:24]
David Roux
And you know, Massason and SoftBank are already large investors, but we liked the management team. We love the story. And that turned out to be a, you know, very good, that was a very, very good investment. And then the last one, and really still very much in the news was Dell. Big, well known public company, you know, eponymously named for its CEO who'd left, kind of like, you know, Charles Schultz left, came back first, went private, where Michael rolled essentially all of his ownership into it. Made a very large personal bet. So it was a gutsy bet because it was at a time again, this is a place where the conventional wisdom was the PC was going away. We were going to use our phones, we were going to use iPads, somehow it was going to go away. We didn't think it was going to go away. And we thought that the market hadn't really appreciated how much work Michael had done building up a store of intellectual property around next generation computing, whether it's cyber cloud computing and you know, maybe it's, it's like maybe a basketball franchise that has a bunch of draft picks, you know what I'm saying? Or kind of young talent, which we thought was going to be very valuable because we had a point of view about the importance of cloud, we had a point of view about the importance of cyber. And we thought that those assets were undervalued because the whole of the company was getting valued like it was a commodity PC vendor.
- [38:10]
Hannah Frei
They say that the fifth Industrial Revolution is about human centricity, about building technology to enhance our abilities and productivity. But previous revolutions haven't exactly been kind to ordinary workers. Can this one really be any different? Can we build a more utopian view of the future while respecting the forces of industry? I'm Hannah Frei, host of the Exponential Era, and I got to sit down with an expert at Nokia Bell Labs to ask these questions. Find out their answers@Bloomberg.com Nokia the forces.
- [38:40]
David Roux
Shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers.
- [38:45]
Bloomberg Ad
So that's why we created the Big.
- [38:46]
Barry Ritholtz
Take from Bloomberg podcast to give you the context you need to make sense of it all.
- [38:51]
David Roux
Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters.
- [38:56]
Barry Ritholtz
You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine.
- [38:59]
Matt Levine
A lot of this Meme stock stuff is I think, embarrassing to the SEC.
- [39:03]
David Roux
Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.
- [39:10]
Barry Ritholtz
So let's talk about what did you do post silver lake in the 2010s?
- [39:15]
David Roux
I'm a starter and a builder. I like backing social entrepreneurs and feel particularly passionate about conservation, biomedical research and education. We took our foundation resources and focused it first on a thing out in Seattle called the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Stood that up. Bill Gates blessedly is doing most of the support now, but that's now, you know, 500 researchers and they focus on understanding in detail the global burden of disease so that we know how healthy or sick, you know, every country is and you know where to allocate our healthcare dollars. On the biomedical research side, became very active as the chairman of Jackson Laboratories, one of the largest independent institutes in the country. Focused on kind of the genetic causes of rare diseases. We were able to double the size of that, quadruple that endowment. And then more recently in the education space I had this view that we were not appreciating how big artificial intelligence was going to be. And that as a consequence as a nation we are underinvested in advanced computer science. In other words, we've got programs at all the best universities, but they graduating hundreds of people, tens of thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands that we need.
- [40:47]
Barry Ritholtz
Really?
- [40:48]
David Roux
Yeah, because what's happened is that the academics are focused on building the new platform, the so called large language models. When think about that like it's a nuclear power plant. Complicated high science. But we now, it now works and it'll work a little better and they'll keep refining it and so forth, but it works. And that what we need next are application engineers, we need electricians, we need people to design appliances, we need to run wires, we need to change from steam to electricity. And we don't have those people. And so we already know what we need. It's going to, by the way, it'll be 20 or 30 years of implementation ahead of us. So these will be great jobs for a lot of people. So we've built the first school, we spent a few years getting that organized, opened it in 20. We're now I guess four years in. We've got a thousand students, 200 corporate partners and started or accelerated 94 companies, 400 jobs, you know, really exciting.
- [41:56]
Barry Ritholtz
You're doing this for a couple of years, you're standing up, I'm happy as a clamor, right?
- [42:01]
David Roux
I'm making things, I'm helping people, right?
- [42:04]
Barry Ritholtz
You're running the Roux Family foundation, the Roux Institute.
- [42:08]
David Roux
You're basically, I was not looking to start a new business, much less an investment firm, right? What happened is that my very good friend Anjan Mukherjee, we were talking about the future of private equity. During that conversation, we were saying, you know, this next generation of private assets needs to do something different if we want to continue producing the supranormal levels of profit that we've seen from the asset class. Because there's more competition, prices are higher, credit's more difficult. You can't count on multiple expansion. So you're going to have to make the business you buy better during the dependency of your ownership. There's only so much procurement improvements available. You can only upgrade management. So far my observation was this, which is that I said, you know, this tech thing, it's only 10% of the economy. When you take all of GDP, when you take all of semis, all of computing, all of networking, all of software, all of social media, it's 10% of GDP. I said, what's going on right now is the other 90% of the economy is being digitized. Huge opportunity now. Big difference is that now the nature of technology is that it's the only capital good that really kind of decreases in price and makes itself smaller, Right? So you think about what's the difference between now and 20 years ago. Now the technology is much smaller, it's much more ubiquitous, it's much less expensive, and it's much easier to use. All of those things mean it's going to go everywhere. So we're talking about this and we're getting ourselves lathered up about the fact that all of these analog companies, industrial firms, consumer firms, health care firms, services companies, they all need to adopt more technology, but none of them know how. Opportunity in plain sight. It's dead obvious that they're going to do this. You think about the companies that you know in those kind of sectors that are doing well are almost always those that have adopted the technology earlier. JP Morgan and finance or Walmart and retail, those companies that get there early get a big leg up on their analog competitors. We said we could build an investment firm that not only could write a check, but could be your technology partner in helping you architect a business model future that would allow you to grow your company faster, perform better, you know, produce more profits you know, and drive value.
- [44:58]
Barry Ritholtz
So let me push back against one thing you said just a little bit, please. This, this opportunity in plain sight. If it was really in such plain sight, everybody would be doing it. But instead it takes a couple of guys with a lot of technology experience, a lot of operational experience and financial experience to make this real.
- [45:20]
David Roux
I partially agree.
- [45:22]
Barry Ritholtz
Okay.
- [45:22]
David Roux
All right. And here's the partial part. The partial part is that I think the opportunity is easy to see. I think the execution is hard. So the way I oftentimes say it is that it's easy to describe. It's just really hard to do. And it's hard to do because you need to understand the technology itself. You need to know the vendors, you need to be able to set priorities, you need to have a realistic sense of time and you need to know how to weave this new technology into the processes that already exist. It's not like these companies have no tech. Any company of any scale has an ERP system, they have a bunch of databases, there's compliance issues, there's cyber, there's all kinds of things so that you have to integrate into what's already there.
- [46:20]
Barry Ritholtz
So when I think of private equity, at least from the 90s, 2000s, even the 2010s, I think of them as a form of financial engineering to unlock value. What you're really describing is digital transformative capital, to steal a phrase from your website. So this insight is, hey, we don't need to just do financial engineering. If we could get these companies to adapt the latest, greatest tech in a way that's useful and productive, we can really unlock a lot of value. Is that what led to Bine getting launched and you kind of coming out of retirement to try it again?
- [47:02]
David Roux
Yes. I mean, that was sort of Anjan calling for the lefty from the bullpen.
- [47:06]
Barry Ritholtz
Right, right. Let's get the lefty.
- [47:09]
David Roux
Yeah. So let started innocently enough where it was really a conversation between two friends with a lot of mutual express, you know, respect, where we had a similar 15, 20 year runs in private equity. So we were very current, highly topical understanding of what was going on and we realized that we could take and put in one place. Really, it's like a binary weapon, right, Where a Mukherjee quality, world class private equity firm with fabulous diligence, great structuring, really thoughtful modeling, great financial engineering. We don't want to throw that away. Those are all valuable lessons. But combine it with the operating prowess, tech insight, an extended personal network of relationships that would allow us to do things for and on behalf of our portfolio companies that simply wouldn't be possible, practical, or maybe even imagined by our competitors.
- [48:29]
Barry Ritholtz
It sounds like your competitors are the consulting firms who come in and kind of seagull an event. They come in, they eat everything, they crap all everything, they fly away. As opposed to you guys not only coming in with technology expertise, operational expertise, but capital, writing a check. That's a very different relationship than paying a consultant.
- [48:54]
David Roux
Yeah. You know, it's interesting. The consultants actually play a very important role and I wouldn't want to diminish it.
- [49:01]
Barry Ritholtz
Okay.
- [49:03]
David Roux
Around awareness building. And when we go in to talk to a management team, they almost always have had a consulting encounter.
- [49:19]
Barry Ritholtz
Right.
- [49:20]
David Roux
And they'll have a stack of PowerPoint slides which they'll kind of run to their office to show us. That says, the consultant told me there are 16 things that I can do with technology, but I don't know which one I should do.
- [49:37]
Barry Ritholtz
Right.
- [49:38]
David Roux
I don't know what I should do first. I don't know who should do it for me. I don't know how much it should cost, I don't know how long it will take. I don't know how it integrates with what I've already got. And I particularly don't know what to do if anything goes wrong. And so it goes back to the implementation part. And so what we like to see is a management team that has self awareness and enthusiasm, but are not themselves technically fluent, where, you know, we can bring that to the party in a way that can be catalytic for the management team to give them confidence because they have a willingness to act. They're just not sure what to do and they don't want to do any harm, they don't do something harmful. And so having somebody who's done it before been there is super useful.
- [50:37]
Barry Ritholtz
So let's talk about some of your portfolio companies and how they're engaging in digital transformation. We were talking about AI earlier. How are you guys looking at AI to facilitate taking some existing companies and making them more productive?
- [50:56]
David Roux
Yeah. Well, first thing, we could spend a whole session on AI. But here's what I would say first. We believe it is actually, despite all the hype and notwithstanding all the attention, it's already received, bigger than most people think.
- [51:17]
Barry Ritholtz
Yeah, I'm with you on that.
- [51:20]
David Roux
I'll give you a funny example, please.
- [51:22]
Barry Ritholtz
So I'm in the midst of putting together a manuscript and the publisher, they're not keen on doing an index. Takes a couple of months. You're paying a person all this time to look up every name Everything. Every that for a couple hundred bucks, there's an AI PDF indexer that will identify every proper name in 400 pages and create an index relative to. And I'm just imagining reproducing that sort of dumb mechanical work over and over and over again. And I know I'm just scratching the surface here.
- [51:59]
David Roux
It's a great example. I think that right now most people's experience of AI maybe is a chatbot, right? You know, chat GPT or, you know, or any, any.
- [52:13]
Barry Ritholtz
Go to any car company, you get that pop up and you know, that's not a live person at 2 in the morning.
- [52:19]
David Roux
What I always say is just imagine all the best AI current ones today. And by the way, the, the ones that you're seeing today are the worst that you will ever see.
- [52:30]
Barry Ritholtz
Right? A little better every day.
- [52:33]
David Roux
Worst you will ever see. They read, they write, they hear, they see. They can compose poetry, music in any genre, photorealistic images, they can create video. All of this today, right? Right. This is all available today. They also write computer code as well or better than most programmers. They can do complex mathematics, they can solve puzzles, they can play games, they can run factories, they can drive cars. It is really hard to overestimate what's possible. And we are standing really for the first time, after decades of discussion about it, on a, you know, on the brink of real white collar, dramatic white collar productivity gains. Really dramatic. Best example that I would use for you to kind of give you a framework for it is that you're going to see a lot of AI show up as features in products that you already use, like, you know, all your Apple products.
- [53:52]
Barry Ritholtz
Right.
- [53:52]
David Roux
We'll have it soon. The first thing you get is probably a product will be agents, you know, something that works with you like a partner. Right? Like a writing partner that you would use. Right. Sort of, you know, think about it as a more advanced version of what you were just describing.
- [54:07]
Barry Ritholtz
Right.
- [54:08]
David Roux
The best thing out there right now to illustrate that is a product called Copilot from Microsoft, which works with a software engineer. You have it running on your machine and it's basically a programming buddy that will help you write code, suggest different options, you know, help you debug track, blah, blah, blah. And it typically improves productivity 25 to 50% out of the box.
- [54:37]
Barry Ritholtz
Amazing. And then just.
- [54:38]
David Roux
And can be up to 100%.
- [54:40]
Barry Ritholtz
Right?
- [54:41]
David Roux
Right. It all by itself has dampened the demand for computer programmers, really because it's made the ones that we have so much better.
- [54:53]
Barry Ritholtz
You've doubled the effective productivity up to.
- [54:58]
David Roux
But think about it as very dramatic, right? If you had five, maybe you need four. It's just a really significant improvement, which makes it practical to imagine that you're going to be able to do this in law firms and accounting firms and consulting firms where you take your average employee and make them as good as your best.
- [55:26]
Barry Ritholtz
So let's take an old economy company that's not traditionally tech oriented. You guys own Mavis Tire Express Services. How does a consumer, consumer service business like that get digitally transformed?
- [55:41]
David Roux
How do you walks into our office and said, I know everything in the world about tires. I know where to buy them now, how to store them, not to put them on, not a rotate them. I know how to balance them, I know how to align them. Nothing. I know everything about tires. I know anything about technology. But I have a very strong opinion that technology could help my business. And I just don't know where to start.
- [56:05]
Barry Ritholtz
Huh.
- [56:06]
David Roux
I've got. He had talked to a bunch of consultants. He had lots and lots of ideas.
- [56:11]
Barry Ritholtz
And there are hundreds of these Mavis stores, right?
- [56:14]
David Roux
Thousands, thousands. There were thousand Mavis stores when we first started chatting three years ago. So it's a, you know, it's a good size. It's a good size business, very well run, nice growth, profitable. So wasn't not a business that's broken, but a business where the management team had a felt need around the opportunity to make it better and really steal a march on their competitors. And so what we did is sit down with them and say, look, here are six different use cases that you might want to think about. Here's a way around digital marketing. Here's a better customer experience. Here's what you can do around inventory management. Here's labor productivity and capacity utilization planning. Here's dynamic pricing. And we went through an entire kind of brainstorming session around that produced a whole plan. So usually when you do a new investment, you'll do an underwriting and we do a normal financial underwriting like everyone else. What's different is we also do, in addition, a separate digital underwriting where we talk with the management team to create, you know, a technology roadmap for the enterprise that integrates with their business model and extends it to create performance improvements. And what we did with them sat down, we got better digital marketing so that the search engines optimized for. If you're calling and writing in, I've got. I got a flat tire and I'm in Poughkeepsie, then here's where you go improve the customer experience. So you know, you know when to bring your car in. Limit wait times, accurate estimates of how long it is going to take, what it's going to cost, what your options are, dramatically improved kind of labor utilization in the shops, capacity utilization, got the pricing right so that we manage margins and customer expectations appropriately. All of that, some of we could, we could get done in two days or two weeks, but some of those things has taken us two years to put up. The end result though is that the business is now more than twice as big, roughly twice as profitable. And that's not all due to the digital, but the digital is very fundamentally enabling of that growth as you might imagine if you're opening new stores, it's a lot easier to do if you do the same thing in every single store.
- [59:04]
Barry Ritholtz
So let's talk about another portfolio company, Polywood High density Polythene outdoor furniture. How can technology improve that?
- [59:15]
David Roux
You know, it's an interesting business. It's a specialty manufacturing company that builds kind of very high quality feels like wood outdoor furniture, very durable, colorful, but doesn't chip, doesn't fade, doesn't need to be painted, doesn't need to be painted. You don't have to take it in during the winter, any of those things. So that's sort of the fundamental value proposition of the thing. But here's the difference, which is that we said, look, you guys are manufacturing guys. People have built it and they're really good at because they use recycled plastic. So it's incredibly sustainable. They drill the holes, they do the trimming, they just take the plastic waste, put it back on the top. So it's a zero waste, highly sustainable. Fantastic story. During COVID they grew their online business a lot. They're not marketing people. Right. So we're able to show them how to significantly improve yield on their online, the e commerce side of the business. We're able to, and we're able to do that by the way, very quickly, almost instantly around that. Able to see how to get to new adjacent market areas based on finding more people like the ones who are already buying.
- [60:40]
Barry Ritholtz
Once you identify a customer you want to be able to identify, once you.
- [60:43]
David Roux
Identify them electronically, then it's a lot easier to find that electronic signature, similar people and go look for it online rather than waiting for people to find you. The other thing that we're doing there is that we have highly automated manufacturing and so that we can take the manufacturing and instead of manufacturing 20 or 200 chairs, putting them in a warehouse, sending them to a distribution center or a store and hoping somebody buys them. We can instead take an order, build the chair, send it to them. So it's not just in time, but it's real time. That creates pull so that dramatic improvements in efficiency, but it also makes it hard easier to do custom things improves turnaround time. You get your furniture much faster. Those would be good examples, huh?
- [61:37]
Barry Ritholtz
Really, really interesting.
- [61:39]
Hannah Frei
They say that the fifth Industrial revolution is about human centricity, about building technology to enhance our and productivity. But previous revolutions haven't exactly been kind to ordinary workers. Can this one really be any different? Can we build a more utopian view of the future while respecting the forces of industry? I'm Hannah Frei, host of the Exponential Era, and I got to sit down with an expert at Nokia Bell Labs to ask these questions. Find out their answers@bloomberg.com Nokia.
- [62:09]
Bloomberg Ad
What could you do if your data was working for you and not against you? With Bloomberg delivering enterprise data directly to your systems, you get easy access to the details you want, optimized for higher level analysis and financial data experts committed to helping you maximize your every move. Our data is made for more so you can show the world what you're made of. Visit bloomberg.comenterprisedata to learn more.
- [62:38]
Barry Ritholtz
I only have you for a few more minutes, so before I get to my favorite questions, let me just ask you one last question. We talked about the Roux Family foundation and Institute. Briefly. Tell us a little bit about what you focus on with the Roux Family Foundation.
- [62:55]
David Roux
What we like to do is find social entrepreneurs, folks who are looking to make scale impact in education, particularly educational access, conservation, you know, kind of environmental things, biomedical research. And then a particular focus of mine is around helping support veterans and their families.
- [63:25]
Barry Ritholtz
Really, really good stuff. All right, so this will be our speed round. I have about four minutes, five minutes to get through five questions. Let's just do this quickly. What's keeping you entertained these days? What are you watching or listening to right now?
- [63:41]
David Roux
My wife and I are watching the Lioness and the Diplomat.
- [63:45]
Barry Ritholtz
We're about halfway through the Diplomat, so no spoilers.
- [63:49]
David Roux
Season 2 good. We loved the Crown and I am waiting anxiously for season two of Wolf hall, the Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell story in podcast land. My current favorite is Fall of Civilizations by Paul Cooper.
- [64:11]
Barry Ritholtz
Huh, Interesting. Tell us about your mentors who helped to shape your career.
- [64:17]
David Roux
You know, I've had a couple. I've been very fortunate. Early guy was a guy named Chuck Glover, a newspaper guy who ended up running Cox Enterprises, the media company he funded. My Cox funded my first company he was a newspaper guy, and the key lesson from him was, look, I had to put out a product every day. And so just getting in the habit of putting one foot in front of the other, making a little bit of progress every day and just keep going was really valuable. The other guy who was great for me was Dr. Frank King. And what I learned from Frank, he was the head of engineering at Lotus and had a similar job at IBM before that. What I learned from him was that the people were more important than the products and that building your organization, primacy of people, and particularly always being recruiting, you know, always recruiting, being kind of on the pro all the time was super valuable.
- [65:25]
Barry Ritholtz
Let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites and what are you reading currently?
- [65:30]
David Roux
I'm a Mark Halperin fan. I love Paris in the Present Tense. I like Don Winslow. City on Fire is one of my favorite books. It's first in a trilogy with City of Desire and City in Ruins. I like Anything by Dennis Lehane, Anything by Elizabeth Strout, and I'm currently just finished the Magician by Edmund Duvall. Just reading the Hair with Amber Eyes, also by Edmund Duvall.
- [66:05]
Barry Ritholtz
Huh. Interesting. Our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give a recent college grad interested in a career in either private equity or technology?
- [66:16]
David Roux
You know, I always tell them the same thing. I always tell them to do something else first. And I say that because I'm a great believer in domain expertise. And so I usually counsel younger folks coming out of school to go learn an industry and. Or learn a craft, learn a skill. You know, be good at marketing, be good at sales, be good at finance. Pick something where you're really good at it because it gives you a cachet and a standing that you don't otherwise have.
- [66:53]
Barry Ritholtz
And our final question. What do you know about the world of private equity investing today that might have been helpful back in 1999 when you were first standing up Silver Lake?
- [67:05]
David Roux
Wish I knew how important it was to be first.
- [67:11]
Barry Ritholtz
Really? Huh.
- [67:13]
David Roux
Interesting. I think as an operating person, I probably intuited it and understood it because I kind of saw it around me. The advantages that accrue to a category leader. You just don't need to be as good, you know? Think about Elon Musk. You know, his first electric car was a bundle of borrowed parts and components. It barely worked. It was hugely expensive, literally.
- [67:46]
Barry Ritholtz
A Lotus Elon with laptop batteries.
- [67:48]
David Roux
With laptop batteries in it wired together with, you know, with soldering wire. Cost a fortune. Incredibly uncomfortable to drive. Totally unreliable.
- [67:58]
Barry Ritholtz
Gotta start somewhere.
- [68:00]
David Roux
But he was able to do that for years and years and years and learn and learn and develop, you know, an expertise and some skills. Same thing's true for, if you think about it, Jeff Bezos, right, selling books that no one wanted, losing money hand over fist for a decade. But building infrastructure, building experience, learning lessons, you know, creating a team that became the basis for, you know, both of those things didn't work until they did. And boy, when they worked, they really work great.
- [68:34]
Barry Ritholtz
They really worked. Thank you, David for being so generous with your time.
- [68:39]
David Roux
We have been speaking with David Ru. He is the Executive Chairman of Bipine, a private equity firm focused on digital transformation. If you enjoy this conversation, well, check out any of the 500 plus discussions we've had over the past 10 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Bloomberg, wherever you find your favorite podcasts. And check out my new podcast at the Money. Short discussions with experts on specific topics involving your money, earning it, spending it, and most importantly, investing in it at the Money, wherever you find your favorite podcasts and in the Masters in Business feed. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. Anna Luke is my producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Sage Bauman is the head of podcasts here at Bloomberg. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
- [69:49]
Marin Sums
Not everybody likes talking about money. Some people find it awkward. Sometimes they even find it a little embarrassing. I do not. I like talking about money, whether it's the boardroom, the newsroom, the trading floor. I've spent the last 30 years talking about money, writing about money and talking about it and writing about it a little bit more. I'm Marin Sums at Webb, and every week senior reporter John Stepek and I answer your questions about personal finance and we discuss the best strategies for making the most of your money. Listen in for the kind of insights and explanations everyone can use to help them make better saving and investment choices for themselves and their families.
- [70:21]
Hannah Frei
My question is whether you think maxing.
- [70:24]
David Roux
Out my company pension match is enough.
- [70:26]
Hannah Frei
For when it comes to saving?
- [70:28]
Barry Ritholtz
For my pension, should I attempt to.
- [70:30]
David Roux
Pay my child's university fees and living costs?
- [70:33]
Hannah Frei
My partner and I have excess savings, so should we overpay on our mortgage or should we put the money into stocks?
- [70:40]
Marin Sums
From Bloomberg podcasts, tune into Marin Talks Money, follow Marin Talks Money on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.