走进 General Atlantic：一家1000亿美元成长型股权投资机构如何投资

And I said, “Dennis, it’s a bubble. How does it feel to be in a bubble?” He grabbed my hand and said, “Martín, it feels better than being outside the bubble.” I was like, “He’s absolutely right. I have to go into this bubble. I’m on the wrong side of the table.”

So, I met Martín through Alex Behring at 3G. I try to ask everybody I interview, “Who should I do next?” Alex said, “Martín.” I asked why. He said Martín was the most lovable investor he’d come across.

Sometimes we’re accused of being dolphins in a sea of sharks. I love to be a dolphin. Who wants to be a shark? Dolphins have a much better life.

I think in this conversation, you’ll see that Alex is right. Martín has a refreshingly light, funny attitude and way about him. He clearly does not take himself, or almost anything, too seriously, and yet he has become one of the most successful private-markets investors, now helping run General Atlantic, one of the storied private equity and growth equity franchises in the world.

Drop down with no equipment other than the spear. You let little fish go by because you’re not there to hunt little fish. You’re waiting for the big fish. I think his life is an adventure where you can feel him not only getting better, but at every single moment making fun of it and laughing. You’ll hear him and me laugh a lot in this episode. I wish there were way more of that in the investing field, where so often it’s so serious and so intense. You can have excellence and laughter at the same time, and I think Martín in this conversation is a testament to that truth.

Alex, who introduced us from 3G, told me this incredible story about you getting a job after he told you no and what you did to get it. Can you tell that story? That’s one of the good stories.

Coming out of business school, I needed to decide where to live because I’m from Bolivia. Bolivia is too small. I was finishing 8 years in the U.S. The U.S. felt too competitive, so I had to think of somewhere else that had to be big, not too competitive, and have beautiful people because I was single at the time. Those were the criteria.

So, Brazil.

Brazil. End of story: Brazil.

I looked at the most exciting jobs in Brazil, and at the time the 3G founders had a private equity shop that was the largest private equity shop in the emerging markets. This was 1997, and one of the partners had recently graduated from the same school and was coming to town to interview Brazilians to hire 1 person. I was like, “This is destiny. This is for me.”

So I reached out to Alex Behring, who, as you know, is now running 3G and has become a great friend, and I introduced myself: “I’m this Bolivian, super smart. I really want to make it in Brazil, and I hear you’re doing a dinner. I’d love to come by if you’ll have me.”

Alex, who’s super smart and tough, was like, “Martín, we’re only hiring 1 person, and it’s not going to be a guy from Bolivia who doesn’t speak Portuguese. So, no, you can’t come to my dinner.”

I was like, “Bummer.” So that night, I showed up to the dinner, introduced myself as Martín, and said, “Don’t worry, I’m not even going to eat. I just want to listen to you because I find you interesting.” I think he was taken aback by my boldness, so they did interview me. They did hire me, but they made 1 condition: I had to take some Portuguese lessons before I showed up 3 months later.

And I said, “I’m happy to do it as long as you pay for them.”

Yeah.

And that’s how I met my wife.

She was your teacher.

She was my teacher. She was technically a teacher. The way it really worked is I called my Brazilian friends and said, “Can you find a very smart, very attractive Brazilian Ph.D. or master’s student somewhere in the Boston area? I have someone who will pay her to talk to me.” I’m still married 25 years later.

What have you learned from Alex and from his team?

1. The Art of Spearfishing

The founders of 3G, the original 3 founders, are incredible people whom I worked with in the beginning of my career. I once wrote a book. This was 2003. The company I had co-founded was going through trouble, so I took some time off and wanted to answer the question: How does one make money in countries with so much turbulence?

Brazil in the 1990s and in the 1st decade of the century was incredibly turbulent. Crisis after crisis after crisis. It was very hard to create wealth and build companies with so little. It’s like navigating through the fog.

Yeah.

You can move very slowly, and there are things that can come at you in different ways. I partnered with this professor, this mentor of mine from Harvard College. He was teaching at Harvard Business School, Don Sull. What we did was paired-company analysis: We looked at 10 very successful companies in Brazil that had created tremendous wealth, in contrast to 10 much less successful companies during the same period of time.

The test was that these were pairs of companies that looked similar in size and value at the beginning of the 1990s, but by the end of the 1990s, 1 was at least 5x more valuable than the other. That was the control group, and that’s how we studied them.

One of the companies was the beer company Brahma, which Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles, and Beto Sicupira had bought in 1989. It was competing against the other beer company, called Antarctica, which was owned by the Germans and a foundation. In 1989, Antarctica was the better, more profitable, more valuable company. But a decade later, when the 2 merged, the Brahma shareholders kept 95% of the equity value.

So it was 10x—

Value creation relative to the comparison twin.

How did they do it? They’re great spear fishermen. You don’t chase the fish.

You wait. Well, you decide where you’re going to anchor. You drop down with no equipment other than the spear, and you hold your breath for 1 minute, for 2 minutes. You let little fish go by because you’re not there to hunt little fish. You’re waiting for the big fish. When you’re almost running out of oxygen, you’ve got 2 or 3 seconds to get the big fish and then go up. As you’re both feeling the lack of oxygen, he’s feeling a spear through his chest.

But it’s an exercise in waiting. Why do they say these are great spear fishermen? The 1st step of spearfishing is deciding where you’re going to anchor.

In looking to buy their beer company, they started to think about it 5 years before they were owners of the number-one investment bank in Brazil, Banco Garantia. They were making tons of money out of volatility and inflation because in high-inflation periods, you can make a lot of money if you are smart with math and finance. But they knew inflation would end 1 day, and they said, “We want to buy a company that will benefit from low inflation and rising consumption.” Beer is 1 such company.

But they waited 5 years for this company to come for sale. It came for sale 2 weeks before an election, when the Swiss owners got scared that a socialist was going to become president—Lula’s 1st time in government—and he was from the Workers’ Party. They called them and said, “Can you do a deal in 1 week? We’d like to get out of town. We don’t want to take the risk of a socialist president.”

Jorge had been waiting for that big fish—

For 5 years, and closed the deal in 1 week.

And then he waited 10 years until Antarctica was in trouble after a big devaluation and closed the deal in 3 months. Then he waited another 7 years to do a deal with Interbrew. And then, for the biggest of all deals, he waited another decade to do a deal with Anheuser-Busch.

And basically, over this period, an $80 million initial investment in Brahma became $60 billion-plus, excluding dividends. They’re great fishermen.

They wait for the big fish, and as a concept, that is something I’ve learned from them: Every 4 or 5 years, there’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity that you have to be ready and willing to move quickly to capture. If you do, you can create disproportionate value for your company, your investors, and your employees.

Do you have a story of your own that is the closest to a great spearfishing outing?

2. Navigating Bubbles

I wasn’t an entrepreneur. I was sent out by these 3 guys to find great entrepreneurial companies and invest $500 million in 20 companies. “You’ve got 18 months. Go.”

That was your mission.

That was my mission. Mission number 1 out of business school. Now that I was speaking Portuguese, I could go.

And by month 3?

I remember talking to a buddy of mine because we were benchmarking different models. My buddy had taken a job in a U.S. company that went public in the dot-com era, clearly a bubble, being valued at 20 times revenue, which sounds quaint by today’s standards but not by 1998 standards.

I said, “Dennis, it’s a bubble. How does it feel to be in a bubble?” He grabbed my hand and said, “Martín, it feels better than being outside the bubble.” I was like, “He’s absolutely right. I have to go into this bubble. I’m on the wrong side of the table.”

So I very quickly left the fund, and within, I think, 3 months, we had raised $80 million to launch Submarino.com, which was an e-commerce Amazon.com-meets-Alibaba company taking on Brazil. That happened very, very quickly.

A 2nd time, after we sold my business during the GFC, I was working for another fund briefly and looking to buy a fixed-income exchange in Brazil, which was a dominant platform, an 80% margin business with a lot of competition. Then, all of a sudden, the GFC happened and everyone dropped out—everyone. I was like, “No, you double down.” We were able to buy a market-dominant, high-margin business at 6 times EBITDA, and we did it in 2 months.

People were like, “What do you mean you’re doing something during the GFC?” I said, “If we’re not willing to buy a dominant platform at 6 times EBITDA, we should shut down. The world is not ending. A dominant platform will always be worth more than 6 times EBITDA.” There’s been, every 3 or 4 years, 1 such unique distortion that you have to move very quickly.

That's perhaps one of the learnings of being an entrepreneur in the dot-com. I'm a rare investor who has been an operator, but it's not just that I had been an operator. What the dot-com taught me—and I just realized this recently—is that you can do 7 years of work in 1 year.

Say more. What do you mean?

When Elon Musk says, "Do your 10-year plan and try to get it done in 1 year," you're like, "He's crazy." Then you look at what he's built.

Yeah.

In the dot-com, it felt like the world was on steroids. At Submarino, not only had we raised $80 million within the first 3 months, but within 1 year I was in charge of international. We opened Submarino in 6 countries, with warehouses, customers, registrations, and teams. It was done in 1 year. If you had told me how long it would take a normal person to do that, I would have said 3 to 4 years.

We were going fast, and we were like, "No, we have to do it. This is a first-mover opportunity, and the first mover will be incredibly valuable." We did it in 1 year. So, this ability to move very, very fast to capture opportunities—which are fleeting and seem humanly impossible—are actually not.

This seems like a moment when that is happening, maybe on mega-steroids. I think of a company like Cognition as a recent example that I know well, where the pace of growth of the business is just hard to believe is possible. It's serving developers. Maybe previously, a company like Stripe, which is one of the great companies in the United States and in the technology world, reached a certain size and grew to that size over 15 years. These things are growing at a pace that's sort of hard to wrap one's head around.

I'm curious how you think about that in the current moment, but also what lessons you learned about what it takes to put a 10-year plan into 1 year. What is different about the behavior in that compressed 1-year period that makes that possible?

This is like my 4th or 5th bubble, and all bubbles are born out of a truly transformative technology.

Technology. Yeah.

In all the previous bubbles, the promise was spectacular, the short term was disappointing, and the long term delivered more than expected.

Yeah.

But in that process, a lot of fortunes were made and destroyed.

Yeah.

As a firm, General Atlantic has been around for 45 years. We try to make different mistakes in each bubble. Our approach this time, different from the internet, has been to be incredibly aggressive at deploying AI in the portfolio.

Yeah.

The promise of AI is clear to everyone. Let's see what's working in the real world, and let's share best practices. We have incredible scale, with over 200 portfolio companies and 100 people in our portfolio operations team. This year we'll do 500 projects with the portfolio. A third of them are AI projects, so we're seeing what works on the front lines.

As soon as we see a use case with real ROI, real revenue to the provider of the service, and you can model what the economics and cost to serve are—and what the long-term profitability may be of this exciting new market—then we pounce.

The first area where we felt that has happened is code generation.

Yeah. Cognition and Cursor.

It's just happened right now, in the last 12 months.

It's crazy.

Based on public information, Anthropic's revenues in coding went from $200 million to over $4 billion in 12 months. In B2B, that kind of growth has never happened—ever, ever. It's so exciting, and it's working in real life. Programmers are happy.

Then all of a sudden, you've got this new reality where human programmers are hyperproductive, and they're working alongside agentic programmers who have no moral north star and do not sleep. How you get them to work together toward a common output, which is super-sensitive to you, the client who's relying on the software, is super-exciting.

Yeah.

That's one area. Marketing optimization—obviously, it's machine learning on steroids. We're investors in Liftoff, which is very much focused on this. We're investors in a software company called Insider that does enterprise marketing optimization. Data companies are turbocharged with AI. We're investors in an Israeli company called VI. There's so much. It's super-exciting. It's super-risky.

3. Chuck Feeney’s Vision

We're probably going to look back and say we weren't bold enough in going for the killer app soon enough, but we've been bold enough before and it didn't pay to go very early. What's really interesting about General Atlantic is that we've been around for 45 years through all these technological cycles, and we've been international for 30 years. We've been in emerging markets for 25 years.

We take on a lot of risk—micro-risk. We take on a lot of technology risk because we're investing across what we call 18 power alleys that cut across 5 sectors. Guess what our loss ratio is?

Tell me.

4%.

On capital, or on capital?

On capital. On capital.

Okay.

For this kind of investing, loss ratios of 20% to 40% are common in venture and growth equity. But there's something about the way we deal with risk that allows us to capture what we think are reasonably good returns with a surprisingly low loss ratio.

I think it has to do with an appetite for risk. We don't take binary risk. For us, when we do the sort of scenario planning of 3 to 1,000 scenarios, like you do when you think of an investment, a worst-case scenario is that a company grows into the valuation we paid for it. That limits what you do. It limits the timing of where you go into a new industry. You probably leave some money on the table, but you also leave a lot of risk on the table.

That product of reasonable returns with low risk is a great product.

I have 95% of my net worth in that product, and I sleep well at night.

I have a vastly undiversified portfolio of 2 assets: General Atlantic and Treasuries.

The origin story of General Atlantic 45 years ago is so interesting. Chuck Feeney was such an interesting character. How does his spirit loom in the business and in your personal consciousness?

He's the accidental billionaire. He got the idea for duty-free by looking at naval bases where commerce was free in the Pacific during the Korean War. He started building these duty-free shops, became a billionaire, and sold to LVMH. Then he was confronted with the question, "What is the purpose of wealth? What do I do with this wealth?"

His answer resonated really well with me: the purpose of wealth is to improve the human condition now, not tomorrow—now—because the present value of a happier life for more people now is very valuable.

He wants to give it all away. Forget giving half away. He's like, "My dream is that my last check will bounce. I want to die a poor man, and I want to give it all away."

But before he gives it all away, he believes you can create additional wealth by investing in innovation and backing great entrepreneurs globally. He said to the original founding team at General Atlantic, "Go back the world's best entrepreneurs, be a good partner, and know that all the proceeds of our work will go to great causes."

We've been doing that for 45 years, backing great innovators everywhere. We've invested in over 500 companies over the last 45 years. Half of our investments have been outside of the United States, and we've seen the power of innovation to create wealth globally. This is not a privilege just for the United States. It's not a privilege just for Europe.

This concept of what the purpose of wealth is also meaningful personally. I think when I think of the wealth I'm creating, and the people that I work with are creating, we're all incredibly thoughtful about how we allocate our time and wealth to make the world better in the ways that are meaningful to us. There's no right and wrong.

But I find that accumulating wealth makes you bloated and slow. Using your body and your life as a channel for wealth that comes in but goes to places that can be made better is a beautiful way to approach life, particularly if you're in the profession of allocating other people's wealth into great innovators.

It all makes sense. It all fits together internally, and that's why we've been around for 45 years. There aren't that many—you can count them on both hands—the number of firms that invest in technology and innovation that have been around and been successful this long. I think it has to do with the internally consistent vision, mission, and plan that Chuck had for General Atlantic.

That's not a normal origin story for a firm like this. Usually, it's a purely commercial enterprise. Some young investors set off and build a firm. This was different.

What else about that founding DNA makes the setup of the firm unique? How does his original vision and setup allow you to act differently than others do today?

There's this phrase written into our founding documents: "We're good partners—to each other, to our founders, and to our clients." The partnership ethos is fundamental.

When you look at 45 years of references from 500 companies and thousands of people we've partnered with, and you say, "What do you think of General Atlantic?" they say, "They're good partners. They're good guys. They're good people. They say what they're going to do, and they do what they say. They put the company's interests first."

Sometimes we're accused of being dolphins in a sea of sharks. I love being a dolphin. Who wants to be a shark? Dolphins have a much better life.

I think that's a big part of the firm's DNA.

So, I’ll give you an example. I ran our General Atlantic Latin America program for the first 7 or 8 years of my career at General Atlantic. In all the due diligence sessions, they asked me, “How did you do it? How did you make money in the one neighborhood where no one makes money?”

I just say, “I don’t go.” That’s part of the reason, but the other reason is that we don’t have a Latin America fund.

If we had a Latin America fund, we’d have to put money in Latin America. We’d buy at the top but sell at the bottom. And you know what? If you want to make money, you do the opposite: you buy at the bottom and sell at the top.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

Ah.

Why don’t other people do it? It turns out it’s really hard to have a team in Latin America, China, India, or Southeast Asia compete for attention and money through a global IC. It’s so hard to do unless your culture is about partnership. The culture demands good partnership, and the culture expels behavior that’s not consistent with being a good partner.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

4. Evergreen Funds

We’re structured in a way that, first, we are the largest investor in our own product by design. Right now, the employees of General Atlantic have about 8% of the funds we administer—over $5 billion of our own capital. This does not feel like managing other people’s money. Day to day, it feels like I’m managing my family wealth first and foremost, and I’m doing it with care, intention, and purpose.

The way we fundraise is different also. One of the problems with the industry is the 5-year fundraising cycle. To be able to raise your next fund, you have to deploy at a certain speed, and you need to return capital at a certain cadence. Otherwise, you don’t get to do the next fund. If there is a winter of risk, like we’ve had for the last 3 years, you’re out of dry powder exactly at the time that things are on sale.

The traditional 5-year fundraising cycle creates a lot of distortions and pain for our industry. We have a hybrid evergreen fundraising cycle, meaning that every 2 to 3 years, we have a normal fund. If you want a normal fund, come to GA every 2 or 3 years—perfect. But if you’re a large institution and are willing to do a separately managed account, you can come in at any time. The 2 structures invest in the same portfolio going forward, so there’s never a conflict between them.

The advantage is that there are no fundraising cliffs. We’re always fundraising; it’s always steady. There are no big jumps, and there’s no pressure to liquidate something to meet an artificial target. That makes our lives so much easier.

The third component that I think is distinctive—and which I hated initially—is that we have a communist system of compensation. You all get a percentage of the total performance, not your individual performance. I was like, “Are you kidding me? I’m a spear fisherman. I’ve got some big fish left in me. This communism didn’t work in the Soviet Union. Why is that going to work?”

Then I saw how it changed everything. The level of collaboration is fantastic. The way you prevent the Soviet Union from happening is that if you’re not pulling your weight, you’re not on the boat.

So, it’s a meritocracy. To be in this community where we all win together and lose together, we all have to be effective and bring as much into the partnership as we’re taking away from it. That’s what keeps the health and meritocracy of the system.

But there isn’t a hyper-incentive to be hyperproductive, because if I’m hyperproductive, I’ll make more wins in that game. No, it’s much more about winning as a team as opposed to winning as an individual.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

That dual structure, which is unusual and not common, what are the negatives or tradeoffs associated with that? Do the fund investors get upset that they don’t really know what percentage of the total they’re going to get?

There are 2 very serious tradeoffs. First of all, it takes forever to explain.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

We’ll do it at scale right here. They’ll never have to do anything.

They’re like, “Why do you have 2 series? Which one is better? Which one is worse? I can get why this is good for you, but how is it good for me?” The onboarding experience is painful.

The other downside is that fundraising is a perpetual activity. For a lot of my competitors, every 5 years it’s a 6-month sprint where all they do is fundraise, and then they don’t have to fundraise for another 4.5 years.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

It’s kind of like binge dieting. You only do it once every 6 years.

For us, it’s a no-brainer. That’s a structure that leads to more productive deployment of capital.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

My friend John Kim, who is a very well-known fundraiser at General Catalyst, has this simple equation: persuasion equals desire minus fear. What have you learned about fundraising, given that you’ve had to do it as a firm on a constant basis?

5. The Case for Global Diversification

I think most humans go from FOMO to fear, and one of the traps of our industry is that you can only fundraise when things are very expensive.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

Because that’s when everyone’s in FOMO. Have you been able to invert that fear-to-FOMO problem? If you’ve been able to raise money in the harder times, what’s the key to doing that?

Well, there’s always someone in the world that has excess capital, even in a time of fear, and you go there. In Brazil, one of our tricks—or strategies—to navigate global complexity is that in every geography where we’re involved, we have the best families, the most entrepreneurial families, become investors. We cultivate them not necessarily for their money, but for their insights around the country and around the entrepreneurs with which we partner.

It takes a really long time, and a lot of those families are typically entrepreneurial. They’re like, “No, no, I don’t invest in funds. I invest directly because I created a business, and I’m so good at getting the big fish.”

I ask them a very simple question. I say, “What percentage of your net worth do you have in Brazil?”

They’re like, “Liquid net worth?”

“No, no, no. Total net worth.”

The number is typically between 90% and 95%. I say, “That’s very interesting. Close your eyes. Imagine you’re not Brazilian. You’re a citizen of the world. What percentage of your wealth would you put in Brazil?”

They’re like, “Oh, 3%.”

I say, “How about I help you get a little closer to 3% than the 95% you’re in?”

I find that argument to be genuinely effective because it’s genuinely in their best interest.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

I think people have a natural tendency to overinvest in that which they understand. Of course, those families understand what it is to invest in Brazil. But in doing that, they’re massively underdiversified, and the world has become really risky. There’s only one free lunch in finance.

Diversification is the only free lunch. Thinking strategically about how to diversify and with whom to diversify is hard but super valuable if you want that free lunch.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

Speaking of diversification, maybe the most interesting dimension of that today is geographic. We were talking before we hit record about the incredibly wide gulf between pristine U.S. equity assets and basically everywhere else in the world.

There was a time when you saw this chart between the S&P 500 and the ACWI ex-U.S., or something, and it was back and forth and back and forth. Then the line has just gone like this for 20 years, where the U.S. has so completely dominated everybody else in enterprise value creation, or some measure like that.

How do you interpret that shift? Is it secular? Is it going to be cyclical and go back toward the international markets? What do you think about that crazy bifurcation?

The premium for U.S. exceptionalism has never been higher. U.S. public equities are trading at 26 times earnings for 4% forecasted growth, which is at the 97th percentile of the last 25 years. The U.S. dollar, despite a 10% depreciation this year, is pretty much 2 standard deviations away from the neutral state.

The U.S. has never been this expensive. I love the U.S. It’s still the number 1 economy. I still want to have half my assets in the U.S., but not 90% of my assets in the U.S.

Not only is it very expensive, but total debt to GDP is 125% of GDP. That is the highest in the OECD. It’s higher than it was after World War II, when America levered to defeat the Axis powers. With current plans in place, within 5 years we’re going to be at 145% of GDP, which is higher than Greece and Italy.

The U.S. has not had a recession since 2009. Are you sure you want to have 95% of your assets in the United States of America? I don’t.

If you look at the rest of the world, you can buy Europe at 14 times earnings, Brazil at 9 times earnings, and Mexico at 10 times earnings. We’re finding 40% to 50% growers at 12 times EBITDA, 14 times EBITDA, many of them serving dollarized clients.

The case for global diversification has never been stronger. The price for global earnings has never been lower on a relative basis. I do think that in the next 10 years, those who achieve some level of diversification will be rewarded, because I do think there’s a little bit of froth in the U.S. market and the opposite in a lot of the emerging markets.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

What have you learned on any recent trips to China?

China is fascinating, and I’ve been going to China for 25 years. I’ve seen the development.

It's the fastest change in terms of per capita GDP in modern history of any country at scale. It's an incredibly complex society, with a tremendous amount of innovation, and we were lucky to have been early in China as General Atlantic. We've been investing there for 25 years.

I am highly optimistic that tensions have stabilized and that market conditions are improving. We've been underweight China for the last 5 years, and we just did 2 deals. We're going to pick it up a little bit. There's always binary risk around geopolitics, but there's so much innovation and entrepreneurial zeal.

The 1 thing I learned—I actually learned it over drinks with a Chinese entrepreneur. I've done business in 19 countries, and I love to connect on a human level with the entrepreneur. So much, even at growth stage, of the assessment of the company and of the partnership is about chemistry, and it was very hard for me to build chemistry with Chinese entrepreneurs.

One night, I'm having a long dinner with lots of good food and alcohol with an entrepreneur who was an anthropology PhD from the University of Arkansas. I said, "If someone can explain the Chinese mentality to me, it's this man." He said to me—and like any oversimplification, it's unfair, but there's a grain of truth—"What you have to understand about the entrepreneurs you're dealing with is this: This generation of entrepreneurs, people who are in their 30s and 40s, are all children of the Cultural Revolution. Everything was taken away from these families. Everything. And they are scarred, and they have something to prove because they think something was stolen, and they will get it back."

So there's a level of drive and work ethic that probably matches the refugees of World War II who came to the States and built these great businesses after World War II, or other people who have had hardship in their lives. But this applies to 98% of the entrepreneurs. They saw it with their parents.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

So that's the other condition you should take into account: How do your ancestors show up in your life and values?

We're all products of our traumas, our adventures, and our dreams. That's my worldview. What are my traumas? Some are personal and some are generational.

The generational traumas on my mother's side: My Jewish family had to flee the Russian Empire through Romania, then Argentina, then Bolivia, fleeing and leaving everything behind. On my father's side, there was a very wealthy landed oligarchy of Bolivia. In 1952, there was a revolution; they lost everything, and their house and farms were burned down. They almost died when my father was a teenager.

So, on both sides, there's a sense of loss and escape that is very present. They decided to become communists and doctors. They're both doctors in public hospitals in a little town in Bolivia. That's their trauma, which I relate to the Cultural Revolution. They are religious, so they're not atheists.

In my personal life, the trauma comes from 2 places for me. 1 is that I grew up in Bolivia in the '80s, and that was chaos. Bolivia in the '80s had 7 presidents in 10 years, including 4 coups d'état. We had inflation. Now you get 5% inflation; we had 35,000% inflation.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

35,000. Time value of money—I understand. Okay.

The only time my mom ever punished me was 1 time, when she sent me to exchange her salary for dollars when she got it. I took a 1-hour break to visit a friend, and it lost half its value in that hour. I was grounded for a year because of that 1-hour break during the exchange.

There was also a lot of violence because of ethnic violence in Bolivia. It was rough. It felt unsafe. It felt turbulent. And I have a genetic disorder. I bruise very easily—very, very easily. So getting out of bed and deciding what activity to do has been a risk-reward tradeoff since the age of 5.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

And that is a way of seeing the world that most people don't.

Risk. I know how to price risk. I'm like, "Not worth it." My friends are like, "Why are you always thinking of the downside?" Well, I have my reasons.

I find that when trying to understand a person—I do it with entrepreneurs—seeing what their trauma was is super useful. A lot of the most driven people are driven because of foundational traumas. If you understand them, and you're traumatized yourself, you can relate and empathize, but you also understand the intensity that drives them and whether they can manage it and channel it productively.

If they can, it is such a wonderful engine of transformation, and it's curative. It's healing to channel it in a positive way.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

Have you ever worked with somebody who did extremely well with none of that trauma-based drive, who was just well-adjusted and happy and kicked ass?

No. I'm still looking for her or him. Zero.

Again, it doesn't need to be rags to riches. It doesn't need to be a big disease. It could be something like this: I heard about 1 of my fiercest competitors. He was mowing the lawns of his buddies who were with the cute girls, and his entire life he wanted to show them. I don't judge. Pain is pain.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

Yeah. So how did you learn to harness it? Because the other end of the spectrum could be unharnessed and just chaos. How do you learn to harness or channel it into something productive?

Managing one's emotions productively requires either therapy, writing a journal, or meditating. You should do 2 of the 3. I do 2 of the 3.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

I try to do the 3rd one, but it's really hard.

Meditation.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

Yes. Yeah, we're on the same page.

If I asked a bunch of people who knew you, and knew the investments that you've made across your career, what is a Martín investment? What are the characteristics where they see that company and think, "Oh, that's a Martín investment"? How would they describe it?

This is a funny story. I'll answer the question.

When I got promoted to chairman of the investment committee, elevated from a Latin America role to head of the investment committee at General Atlantic, I was lost. So I went to the 2 founders. Steve Denning was CEO for the first 20 years.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

6. Checklist vs. Gut

Army man, McKinsey man, Stanford MBA, structured.

I said, "Steve, how do I make decisions across so many geographies and business models? What's the framework you think I should apply to add value to my partners?" And he said, "You should develop a checklist that captures the characteristics of a winning GA deal. Go back and look at our 25 years of history, at our best deals. I'll share a couple of characteristics. I give you the 3 Ms, but there are probably 5 Ps as well. Create a checklist."

I was like, "Yeah, checklist." That same day, I went to the co-founder, Dave Hodgson. He's just super good, but the smartest guy in the room, always.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

I asked him the same question, and the first thing he said was, "Avoid the temptation to use a checklist. If it were as simple as a checklist, we wouldn't get paid millions of dollars to do what we do."

I was like, "Checklist. No checklist. Okay." Whenever there is a paradox, there's an elegant unparadoxing of the paradox.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

Yeah.

The discussion referenced Thinking, Fast and Slow, The Checklist Manifesto, and checklist work for the Israeli Defense Forces to create a checklist for elite agents. It turns out the checklist works, but in applying the idea of a checklist, there were these super-interviewers who got even better results consistently than just the average interviewer.

There was something beyond the checklist that was statistically significant. In 1 interview with a super-interviewer, she says, "I do the checklist because I have to, but after I do the appraisal, I close it, and I close my eyes and see how I feel, and I go with my gut." And she had perfect scores.

So the framework I use for the perfect Martín or GA deal is the combination of a checklist with my gut, which I call educated intuition. What's in the checklist of things we like? Huge TAMs, business models that create economic value, and moats; teams with the right go-forward capabilities; situations where there's inorganic growth to get; and a tremendous amount of strategic value, meaning someone will overpay to have this capability if we're successful.

Those are the things that the checklist aspires to. Personally, in the deals I've led, they have to make the world better.

I am so proud that I invested in the number-1 investment platform in Brazil when there were only 80,000 people who owned stocks in Brazil. Now 10 million people own stocks.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy

What's it called?

XP. It's publicly traded, with a $10 billion market cap. I invested when they were nothing.

I am so proud that I went against every convention and invested in an edtech company. Edtech was a dark alley. We have power alleys. There are some places we don't touch. And I was like, "No, no, no. This is different. This is different."

This little company in the Northeast of Brazil was creating K–12 learning systems. Instead of using textbooks, you package everything in a sort of hybrid notebook with digital content. It went from 80,000 students to 8 million students. Eight million kids every day now use this platform, and it's world-class. It has really good content, and it's an amazing entrepreneur, the son of a teacher. We made money.

We have a platform that 97% of financial institutions use for digital onboarding. It turns out Brazil is the world capital of online fraud, and this is the 1 company that catches it. I am so proud that I started mentoring this kid when his company was nothing. I did it through Endeavor, and it took me 8 years before it became investable for GA. Then we invested, and now they're dominant.

If it makes the world better, you see, it's beyond money.

It's energy. If the checklist is mind and instinct is gut, have you met a great investor who's mostly heart?

No. I think heart is super important if you want to be a leader of a large organization, because you have to move the hearts of hundreds, thousands of people to row in the same direction with purpose and effectiveness. That is crucial, and the heart is so powerful. It overrides gut and brain.

To do it at scale, you see these people who are super-good leaders. Their energy is captivating, and they are wizards of the trade. It's really hard to do all 3.

Part of being a good investor is not falling in love, because at the end of the day, you have a fiduciary duty to produce returns, and you have to make some tough calls. Love is a treacherous thing.

So, funny story: the 1 time that I didn't follow the checklist was for love. Obviously, I had a checklist for the woman I was going to marry. When I met Daniela, my Portuguese teacher, she didn't score very high on the checklist.

Where was she deficient?

I will say, but in things that are absolutely irrelevant to the task at hand. I had the wrong framework, and she was perfect in every way. She's been perfect in every way. So, in matters of the heart, forget the checklist.

Yeah.

But I don't think the 3 of them come together in the investment profession.

You mentioned the 2 founders. What about Bill Ford? What have you learned from him?

Oh, Bill—so much. I've worked with Bill for 15 years. I actually pitched Bill my startup in 1998. I came in through New York, and I had heard a lot about General Atlantic, how they're different, how they think long term, and how they're good partners. Chuck Feeney—it was really hard to get the meeting.

We got the meeting, and Bill and I really hit it off. I made the pitch, and he's like, "We're not ready for Brazil. I'm really sorry." I was heartbroken because I really wanted GA, and Bill was an amazing guy.

10 years later, after I sold my business and was working at another fund, he called me and was like, "Remember me?" I was like, "Yeah, I remember you." He's like, "Can we try this again?" I said, "Yeah, we can try this again, but just for your information, you would have made 18 times your money if you had said yes."

So, Bill has an incredible ability to see around corners and be visionary—to make bets before they're obvious. Going into Europe, going into the emerging markets, going into consumer, going into life sciences, and pushing me now to go into robotics and humanoids, I'm like, "Bill, too early." He has an incredible ability to look around corners.

He also has heart in managing the partnership and us—not for investment decision-making, but in keeping our culture, the meritocracy of the firm. That heart has helped me develop as a leader of GA and has let me lead from the heart. He's also an incredible moneymaker, so his mind—

That helps too.

That helps.

As you've progressed in your investing career, what changes the most as you become more senior? How does it feel most different doing it today versus doing it when you were a young analyst with lots to prove?

Yeah. The hardest thing when you're young is developing patience and the conviction that you can wait a little longer for the big fish. You're young, it's up or out, and you want to get going.

You want to get going. You want to get deal experience. You want to get notches on your belt. That's completely the wrong instinct.

When you're older, you have a lot more range, you've seen a lot more, and you've got patience. You're like, "Nothing scares me, and I know a big fish will come. Calm down. No pressure."

You're less on the front lines and more of a coach-player, helping and training young partners to do what you used to do. Initially, that can be very demotivating, because Tom Brady likes to be on the field, not coaching or opining on Fox.

Yeah, maybe not so fun.

Until you reimagine the game and live vicariously through the people you're training, enjoying their wins almost as much as you enjoyed your wins. That's been the mental flip I had to make to enjoy this phase, because of course scoring goals is better than coaching unless you make the mental shift to live vicariously through them.

The hard thing—and that's why there aren't that many venture and growth equity investors over the age of 50—is not just that we become rich, get tired, or develop new interests. I think our brain ages and stops being plastic.

One of the great learnings from David Hodgson, whose mind has aged beautifully—he's in his late 60s, very sharp, and very much on top of the new trends—is that he defies the convention. I said, "What's the secret? Forget Peter Attia. I want to hear from you. I just want the young brain. I don't care about my VO2 max. I want the young brain."

He said 3 things. The most important one is, "I refuse to think like an old man. I still play, I still wonder, I'm still in awe, and I don't fall into the trap of thinking I have the answer to everything. I'm always learning, experimenting, and playing."

That's the hardest part, because we have this illusion as we get older that there's no room for play. There's no room for play. There's always room for play.

How do you inject that into your life?

You just don't take yourself too seriously. I'm always laughing about everything, making fun of everything. Even when confronted with the worst perfect storm, where something happens, I start laughing and say, "What are the odds? So many bad things could happen all at once. This has never happened before—7 things at the same time. Let's work through it."

That attitude makes life a lot more fun.

What do you make of this current bubble that we're inside or outside, depending on your perspective? You mentioned humanoids, and you mentioned biotech a little bit. There's all this exciting stuff happening, probably all of which in the long run will be amazing for people. There will be a lot of consumer surplus and all this. You want to make money through this process for yourself and your partners. How does it feel to you?

This is more meaningful because it will touch a higher percentage of GDP.

Right? The internet was the other very meaningful one, but it changes how we interact with each other. This will change much more than that.

7. Career Advice for the AI Era

Unambiguous recommendation: if you're in your 20s or early 30s, go work in AI, because you're going to live through dog years—what we're talking about, 7 years of activity in 1 year. Regardless of whether that company does well or you make money, you're going to have compressed learning that only happens once every 20 years.

Don't miss that opportunity. When I say that age group, I mean that mental age group. You could be in your 50s and be in that mental age group. When you're ready to take risk, just go do it. If you have a young mind today, go work in AI, because it's going to be so much fun.

I think investing is risky. Our approach, which may prove to be too conservative, was to take it slow because it's not clear yet where the value is going to be created. It's not clear yet how much more powerful the large language models are versus others that are more efficient, or how much of the value will be captured by the models versus the applications.

So, it's exciting to watch. I know we're going to have a moment where we're all going to wake up and say, "We've invested too much." I don't know if it's 3 years away or 18 months. No, for sure it hasn't happened yet.

You don't think so? You don't think there's a chance that we're in that moment already?

No.

Why? Why not?

It's not crazy enough. I was looking at some stats comparing the AI wave—let's not call it a bubble wave—to the dot-com era and the railroads. It was looking at the ratio of capex to revenue, what percentage of GDP was involved in this, and how this capex was funded.

Capex-to-revenue is still not crazy, and new revenue streams are emerging. The biggest difference relative to the railroads and dot-com is that the funds are coming from really rich companies—the magnificent six—who are printing money out of their dominant positions and reinvesting a lot of this money into the capex that's powering all this innovation.

It's very healthy. It's not junk-bond speculators or thin-margin telecom companies that are levering up the wazoo with retail money to fund this wave of innovation. It's really profitable companies, so I think it's got more legs.

Will it be bumpy? Yes. But the thing about predicting the future is that it's really hard. Explaining the past is a lot easier.

I'm always interested in the difference between risk, which I think of as sometimes quantifiable or imaginable, and pure uncertainty—where we literally just don't know what's going to happen. If you think about where you've made money, how much do you think came from the willingness to embrace uncertainty versus taking really calculated risks?

Listen, you never invest a lot of money without visibility into what you're doing. There is fog and different layers of fog. What the fog does is slow you down, but if you pierce through, you see clarity.

You see a monopolist at 6 times. You see an opportunity to take. It's not a shot in the dark and hope for the best. What you can't do is just shut down and say, "This is too risky, too unpredictable."

Like, too unpredictable.

Yeah. You just have to engage with the unpredictability until you see something before others and strike for the fish.

In an era like this, when everything is changing so fast and understanding the core technologies is important, how do you personally learn? What is your preferred method to stay abreast of what is going on and stay in touch with reality?

Talk to young people.

Yeah.

Surf TikTok. Try different apps. Try crazy things. Go to places where there are no old people.

And you don't care.

I don't care if someone calls me old. I'm just playing.

So it's just: keep it fresh.

Value is in the new.

Mm.

Being in the new always, even if it turns out to be a dead end. Most of what we do is dead ends, but it doesn't mean it wasn't valuable to try it.

So that's the hardest thing.

8. Power Alleys

There's been this wild transformation of our industry in the time that you've been a professional in it. What does the competitive dynamic feel like to you today? There's such a large universe of smart people and amazing companies.

The universe of amazing companies has expanded. The number of $100 million-revenue businesses growing 40% or 50% has grown 10×, because there is more technology and more people taking risks in more places.

Unfortunately, we compete against 19,000 GPs. One of my competitors said—and it was not a very nice thing to say—that there are more GPs than McDonald's in the United States. It's one of those things where the GPs that are smaller don't feel nice when you compare them to McDonald's. There are really too many GPs, and the industry is consolidating.

It's become incredibly competitive. You have to have more clarity: What is your competitive edge? How have we thought about our edge? We've built this brand around being good partners. This brand means something, and people get value from having GA inside. It helps them recruit talent, get clients, go public, and scale—to have muscles that small shops don't have.

We have 100 people in operations. They can help you with pricing, sales force effectiveness, AI for customer service—whatever you need, we've got a team. It's there for free. Go for scale.

We have an in-house human capital team that taps into a database of 15,000 vetted executives. If you need a CTO, we'll send you a list tomorrow of 8 people in the area who we've worked with and who we think fit. That's one area.

Then you have to be a specialist. You can't be a generalist anymore. We've chosen what we call the GA power alleys. There are 16 power alleys—things like AI applications, value-based care, and digital payments. In those power alleys, we think we're among the best in the world, and we show up with 32 case studies showing that we've done this 32 times.

Yes, you can copy things that work, but guess what? You don't know the things that didn't work—the things we tried that are going to prevent you from trying them. So it's made it harder to compete.

But I do think scale and experience help, provided you are deliberate about learning from the experience and focused on how you build capabilities with scale in areas that really matter, not just areas that look good on a website.

If you were teaching a seminar for young investors who were only allowed to invest in non-U.S. companies—everything but the U.S.—what are the most important things for that group to know about doing that well that are distinct from what it would take to do well in the U.S.?

There's a lot more volatility, so the frequency of surprises is much higher. Agility is super important.

We're also low-trust cultures. Even though most of them are religious, that doesn't mean you can trust them. A higher percentage of the time, you may find yourself with a crook across the table. So the value of references is much more important, and knowing how to do a good reference is super important, because people don't easily say bad things about other people.

The third one, which is a positive one—the great advantage of being outside the U.S.—is that there are so many things that don't work well.

Lower-hanging fruit.

Humongous lower-hanging fruit. If you provide a great service, you capture a lot of value for a really long time.

How do you do a good reference for an investment?

You do it with a family that has given you money to make investments. You say, “Jan, we're about to invest $200 million in this entrepreneur. You know his grandfather. Do you think we should take this risk?”

And he's like, “Oh, no way. He's a crook—a son of a crook.”

Because he has money with you, he tells you the truth. If he didn't have money with you, at worst he'd say, “I don't know. There's some noise. I would do my homework,” or, “They're fine.”

For hiring, there's another hack that I learned, which is so important. So much of life is getting the right people on the bus. When you're going to do a reference on a hire, you call the person and say, “Hey, we're considering David for this role. This role involves the following 5 challenges,” and you list them.

“This is a very important decision for my company, because we can't get this wrong. It's also a very big decision for David, because he's happy at his job, and if he gets this wrong—if we get this wrong—we've wasted time, and he's out of a job. Help me assess if this is a good risk for me and David. If you can't have an honest discussion, or if you don't feel comfortable engaging like this, let's not talk about it. But that's what I need the reference for.”

You'd be surprised. People are like, “Well, for that risk, David? Leave him there. He's fine.”

That is a genuine way to answer it, because what I described is actually true. If this is a bad fit, David should not be taking this job. Reference calls like, “Tell me about David. Is he a good guy?” are a waste of time, because people say, “Yeah, he's a great guy. He's very competent.”

What have you learned about managing—or helping manage—the career success of investors, which is a very distinctive job from a career ladder in a company or something? Incentives matter a lot, I'm sure. I'm curious what you've learned about incentives. What mistakes have you made? If you think about being responsible for other investors and wanting them to thrive, what are the good, the bad, and the ugly that you've learned?

It's an apprenticeship business, so pairing people with different skills and different styles is super important. Helping them from a very young age to make recommendations is also important. Don't just do the task. Answer the “so what?” and ultimately say, “What's my level of conviction in doing this investment?”

Don't rely just on the more senior people. One of the tricks I used to use—I’ve been in 3 investment committees in my career: 3G, Advent, and GA—was to try to understand the mind of each investment committee member and predict what they were going to ask.

I would read the memo and say, “Jorge Paulo is going to ask this, Bill Ford is going to ask this, and Juan Carlos Torres is going to ask this.” I would also predict their vote. By the end of a year of doing this, I was up to 80% or 90%.

What was really interesting was that it forced me not only to have my own opinion about a deal, because I would read the materials, but also to look at it from the perspective of someone who was really good at making these kinds of decisions. My ambition was to one day be completely unpredictable when someone tried to do this with me after I became a senior person, because I was capturing learnings from 3 perspectives.

It's not true. I'm actually pretty predictable by now. But learning vicariously, by forcing yourself to have opinions and also putting yourself in the minds of people who are proven investors, is apprenticeship on steroids.

One of the things we do at GA, which I'm really proud of because it was culturally very hard to do, is that our investment committees are open to everyone.

The whole firm?

The whole firm of investment professionals. Every Tuesday, 190 people sign up, and there's no presenting.

We come in directly to Shark Tank—just questions.

And it's beautiful.

Talk me through how that meeting works. One person, like a sponsor, is proposing a deal?

There's a deal team. The deal team is typically a combination of a sector specialist and a geographic specialist put together. There are standardized materials with a checklist. It gets distributed by Friday, and on Tuesday we come in.

There's no presenting. The deal lead—the main sponsor—is there to answer questions. We have 5 investment committee members and the IC robot, which also opines, and we just ask questions.

What's the IC robot?

We've been training this sixth member of the IC based on 45 years of data. She votes on all our deals, and we've been having her do this for the last 3 years.

Is she any good?

We've back-tested her. Yeah, she's much better than humans.

But it turns out someone who's been trained in the past is very good at the past.

Yeah. We only have 3 years of concurrent data, so we need to wait another 4 or 5 years. I'm hoping that by the time I retire, in about 10 years, she'll be better than me.

If I could somehow do that exercise with you—where I could predict the sorts of questions that you tend to ask about companies—what are they like? What are the big ones that you find yourself constantly asking sponsors who are promoting a deal?

Getting into the mind of the founder: his or her motivations, why this is so special, and the trajectory that got them to this point. I try to meet the founders outside the investment committee process.

As a sponsor, I look at the basis of competition—the true, distinct competitive advantage—and the durability of the competitive advantage.

Then I try to push people on the tails, both positive and negative. If these 6 bad things happen, how bad is it, and how likely is it? Or if this amazing development happens—which could be amazing—how unlikely is it, and who else would benefit from it? I always find the tails to be the most interesting because, if you look at the distribution of our returns, 10% of our best deals get lucky and produce a 50% return. So we lose money very little, and then, in 10%, we get 5x-plus, and these are really important.

All of them are better than the upside case in our memos because good things happen that we did not see coming. God bless and thank God. So I always find myself asking, “Where are the lottery tickets?”

How do you assess it? It seems, first of all, incredibly important. All the data we know show how important the right tail is for investing outcomes. It’s a well-worn truth at this point.

How does one get better at assessing the option value embedded in a given business? That just seems so crucial, but I’ve never seen a book about that. There’s no podcast about that. You’ve got 10 investments. How do you know which of the 10 has more embedded right-tail option value?

The pattern recognition from having seen winning lottery tickets gives you some help. If you’ve seen more of these, you begin to see how you can get lucky. More importantly, in all those lucky scenarios, there was a spearfisherman at the top to capture an opportunity that was available to many, but they seized it. So it’s a lot more about—

The capital allocator at the top. It takes one to know one. Some people are really good at it; some people are not spearfishermen.

What is your unfinished business professionally?

I could not think of a better activity than working in growth equity at General Atlantic for the next 10 years, in global growth equity, in the middle of the AI revolution, with the seniority that I have and the dry powder. Pinch me, pinch me, because I hope I don’t die in a plane crash, because it’s going to be great.

After that, I think you have to start thinking. I’ve been actively mentoring entrepreneurs through Endeavor, which is a nonprofit. I’m on the board, and I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I actually started mentoring—which is an interesting tidbit—when my business was running out of cash, and a dot-com sounds exciting, but there was a death—you know, the dark valley of death. Linda Rottenberg, the founder of Endeavor, said, “It is precisely at your darkest moment that you mentor, because it’s a sign that you have something to give.”

In the darkest moment of the night—which is interesting, the whole AA buddy system is so valuable because even at your darkest moment, you have enough light to help someone, and that gives you the strength to make it through. I’m a huge believer in mentoring. That’s something I will do for the rest of my life.

As I get older, I want to help in higher education in the U.S. I think we’ve lost our way. I saw the impact a scholarship to Harvard had on a young kid from Bolivia, and I love that institution. I love education, and I think it’s at a moment when it’s lost its way, and we can find it back.

Can you teach me mentoring? How does one mentor?

9. Mentoring

My strategy—there are many ways to do it. I don’t have time to be someone’s mentor for 6 years. Maybe as part of Endeavor, I’ll see them twice. I have to hurt them for the mentoring to be impactful. I have to make it so obvious that it’s so stupid they haven’t yet focused on this that they’re like, “Shame on me,” and then they act on it.

My mentoring sessions are very uncomfortable. I do it with a smile on my face, of course, but it works. It’s like crash therapy—like 3 years of therapy in 1 hour. You have no time for bullshit. We’re going directly for the sensitive points.

I learned to do it in a way that’s not damaging or disrespectful in any way. But it is very scathing, saying, “You can’t—this is clearly an opportunity. Come on, wake up. Smell the coffee.” Sure enough, now I have a couple of billionaire friends who are like, “You really hurt me, but thank you.”

I’m always curious about the literal process. If you’re meeting someone for the first time, is the format that you ask them a bunch of questions and then quickly do the aggressive, “Why aren’t you doing this thing?”

I’m married to a shrink, a psychoanalyst, so as a condition of our marriage, I have to do psychoanalysis, and it’s a wonderful thing. I joke that it’s one of the 3 things I do: therapy and meditation.

One of my favorites—he’s now deceased—was a philosopher-writer, an incredible Italian-Brazilian guy who was very famous in Brazil. You would go to this 1-hour weekly session, and he would look at you in silence. If you didn’t say anything after a while, he’d just say, “Então,” and “então” translates as “so.”

I learned that the most powerful way to start a conversation with someone you’re trying to get to know is silence. You tell me.

What do you want to talk about?

What do you want to talk?

Simple.

Simple. I’ll give you another one. I ask, “What’s the most important question you need the answer to from the universe?” The answer to that question is so powerful because vocalizing that which you most want the answer to is liberating.

My traditional closing question for everyone is the same: What is the kindest thing that anyone’s ever done for you?

10. Kindest Thing

Daniela taught me how to love. As we established, my heart’s not very developed, and my gut and my brain are very developed. She’s such a loving, wonderful woman. I’ve been loved by her and learned from her how to love back, and then learned from her how to love our daughters and the way that they need to be loved. She’s so smart, and loving me can sometimes be very hard.

A beautiful place to close, and thank you for the reminder to laugh a lot in these conversations. Thanks for your time.

Thank you for having me.