Asurion: 50X Season Two - (50X, S2)

Today, we're dropping a special episode in the Invest Like the Best feed. 50 x is back, a fan favorite series from Will Thorndike and the team at Compounding Labs. Will's book, The Outsiders, is one of the best business and investing books that you'll ever read. You'll hear him continuing his work in the hosting chair as he looks in detail at investments that have appreciated at least 50 fold. Season two features Asurion. Colossus is excited to partner with Will as he sits down with the management and investors behind this legendary investment. We kick off this special drop with a short interv

An often overlooked pattern among power law companies such as Asurion is an ethic of frugality and cost vigilance. We relish the story of former Capital City CEO Tom Murphy painting only the two sides of his Albany TV station that faced the road. While CEOs in the past needed such traumatic examples to emphasize the importance of cost control, CEOs today are blessed to have a platform like Ramp, which can provide expense visibility across the entire company in real time, using powerful software to close books faster, control excess spending, and facilitate cost comparison. Ramp is the finance

Will, I thought ahead of your release of 50 x on Asurion, which is an investment that is one of the most remarkable in history that people will love the story when they hear about it, that we should record to hear you reflect on it a little bit. You've been a big part of this investment journey too, even though you're the Virgil in the 50 x context. You two have been a key investor in the business over the long period of time.

Maybe you could just give us your overview of your personal experience with this company and with this investment. Asurion was an extremely early investment for me. I made it very early in the first stage of the private equity firm I was involved with building, Housatonic Partners, at a time when we were making our investments on a deal by deal basis, which is an important detail. Because what it meant is we were making them out of a serial LLC structure, which had no fund life. So we had the structural luxury of being able to hold these investments for long periods of time, and we made eight

Okay. Keep going.

Very far back for me, and it's sort of a remarkable story. I mean, the way I would frame it so this is an investment that was originally made out of a search fund in the very early days of search funds. I mean, this is deal number five or six, maybe seven in the history of search, some super early days. And if you look at all of the search companies that have been bought in the ensuing years, there are hundreds of them. That number, in fact, is closing in quickly on a thousand. If you were gonna score them, we use something a very simple metric for scoring growth equity transactions generally,

impossible to be totally precise about it because it's not a publicly traded business. But rough justice, what kind of a multiple of money did the investment represent from the beginning to through to today?

It's not precise. Podcast is 50x. It's in the zip code of a 100x 50x.

A 100x 50x. Got it. Yeah.