Mitchell Green - Lessons from Cold Calling 10,000 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.464]
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Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of PositiveSum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. 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 Mitchell Green, the founder of LeadEdge Capital. When I think about LeadEdge, I sort of think about this giant money machine that Mitchell and his two partners have designed over the last fifteen plus years to make remarkably consistent investment returns for their clients. They have all sorts of unique aspects to the machine that they built, whether that's their collection of LPs, their eight point criteria for how they select companies, the way they do cold calls, the way they construct their portfolio. This is just a totally different way of approaching markets. They're tr
Hierarchy of Bullshit.
And the bottom one is the place that's voted the best place to work in New York City or something. Absolutely. Where did that list come from?
How did you put that together? We've always found that the best way to communicate with our audiences, which is entrepreneurs and also our LPs, our clients effectively, is to like write a quarterly letter about a different topic. And I started my career cold calling companies and that's the way we source deals. But when you start your career talking to, I think Brian and I probably spoke to like 10,000 companies. And if you want to know it's a good company, call 10,000. Call 10,000 of them. You'll figure out really quick. It's pretty good pattern recognition. Until our head of PR comms came in
Talk to me about the 10,000 calls. What did you learn calling that many companies?
You learn to be very disciplined actually and you learn that most things are actually just noise and to figure out what makes a lead edge company and then try to ignore everything else. And you learn a lot about like responsiveness of people and more responsive CEOs tend to be better CEOs. I think another thing you learn that's really important for young people, if you tell an entrepreneur that you're gonna actually do something, then actually do it. Well, I think that's actually true of like your life. There are so many people that say they'll do things that just never do them. And so if you'
Can you describe what seems to me like I would call it a machine that is lead edge, much more than most investment firms where a lot of great investors will tell you there's a lot of art, everything's different. Lead Edge feels to me like unbelievably well constructed as a machine to produce returns. Yeah. Before we go into all the component aspects of the machine, describe the machine itself at a high level before I get off on a tangent.
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