Dan Sundheim - The Art of Public and Private Market Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.460]
Episode publishedPodcast: Invest Like the Best with Patr...Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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Most software companies try to maximize your time on their app to juice engagement. Ramp does the exact opposite. Ramp understands that no one wants to spend hours chasing receipts, reviewing expense reports, and checking for policy violations. So they built their tools to give that time back, using AI to automate 85% of expense reviews with 99% accuracy. And since Ramp saves companies 5%, it's no wonder that Shopify runs on Ramp, Stripe runs on Ramp, and my business does too. To see what happens when you eliminate the busy work, check out ramp.com/invest. OpenAI, Cursor, Anthropic, Perplexity
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is 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 PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
My guest today is Dan Sondheim. Dan is the founder and CIO of D1 Capital Partners. I've wanted to do this conversation for a long time. Dan is one of those investors who thinks about markets and business constantly and has built a career entirely around that obsession. What makes him unique is that he operates at full intensity across both public and private markets simultaneously, with major stakes in some of the most important private companies in the world like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, while running a global public equity portfolio that spans nearly every industry and doesn't concentr
It changes over time. It depends on where you are in a cycle. I'd say right now, I think that there's a lot of interesting opportunities in late stage privates. Some of the largest companies in the world by market cap are private right now. And not only are they large and private, they are innovating in a way that's gonna change the world. This moment is particularly interesting. I think that in general private markets are less competitive. There's obviously the core skill set of analyzing businesses is the majority of what creates value, but there's other aspects of it too. Like oftentimes th
If you think about the key companies in your private portfolio today, Anthropic, OpenAI, companies like SpaceX, Ramp, etcetera. What does that group teach you? What do you think you see coming that maybe the public markets don't fully appreciate yet, that don't have that same exposure to those great private businesses?
As long as I've been doing private and public investing, at some points in time there is synergy. But I'd say if you go back to when we founded the firm, 25% of time we looked at a private company, there was some synergy with what we were doing on the public side. Now because of AI and because of there's so much innovation happening in the private markets, the synergies are just greater than I've ever seen before. And that I think if you're gonna take a view on public companies that are deeply impacted by AI, which eventually will be almost every public company. You should have an opinion on w
When you first were considering your initial investments in OpenAI and Anthropic, did you pattern match their businesses or their business models on anything that you had seen historically? Did they remind you of anything?
They were very different in that when we first invested in OpenAI, I wouldn't say it was contrarian at all. To some extent, we invested originally at the $125,000,000,000 round. So I don't think people were entirely sold on LLMs as a business mod
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