Brad Jacobs - Think Big and Move Fast - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS]
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Welcome to this classics episode. Classics are my favorite episodes from the past ten years published once a month. These are n of one conversations with n of one people. Brad Jacobs' simple principle of think big, move fast is one I think about often. He is a true force of nature, and I hope you enjoy this episode. Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and wanna go d
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of positive sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
My guest today is Brad Jacobs. Brad's resume is remarkable. He's founded seven companies, all of which are billion dollar or multi billion dollar businesses. He's done 500 M and A transactions and raised $30,000,000,000 of debt and equity capital. Currently, he's the executive chairman of XPO, a commercial trucking company that he started in 2011 and has grown into one of the largest logistics businesses in the world. He's also written a book that will be out in January titled How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. What a title. Brad's energy is infectious, and our conversation unpacks his strateg
a word, scalability. So the only way I know to create huge value is to create a company that five and ten years after you started is much, much larger. And the easiest way to do that is through m and a. Of course, you have to have organic growth as well. But I look for industry where it's large enough. If I wanna create a company that's tens of billions of dollars in revenue, then I have to do an industry that's hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. If I want to consolidate an industry, there has to be things to buy. There has to be things to buy on accretive terms. There has to be thing
So if that's the metric, why aren't there 10 of you? Why is there only one distinct story like yours that somebody in a serial fashion sort of goes and builds companies with some similar ingredients in the recipe in different industries. It's strange that there's not other people that have had a similar story like yours. There's
plenty of other people who have done m and a and created tons of value doing m and a. I've maybe done a little more m and a than most people, and the teams I've led have done very well in terms of integration and optimization of those acquisitions. But I didn't invent M and A. M and A has been around for a long time.
One of the things you said is the ability to do great accretive acquisitions, buy at a lower multiple than your stock trades at maybe. I think of Henry Singleton or some of the great stories through history. What are the markers of industries that have that feature? Do they tend to be very mature industries? Do they tend to have anything else that you would look for that would cause those low multiples to exist, hyper fragmentation or something else? It's
not that they have to have low multiples, although I tend to go to industries that are single digit multiples, not double digit multiples, maybe low double digit multiples, but I'm not a fifteen, twenty times EBITDA kind of guy. If you look at the 500 or so acquisitions that
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