Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435]
Episode publishedPodcast: Invest Like the Best with Patr...Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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The best operators have a relentless focus on leverage, finding ways to multiply their impact rather than just working harder. But here's what I see happening in finance teams everywhere, brilliant people getting buried in expense management busy work. If you think about it, you become a finance leader because you love strategic work, modeling scenarios, optimizing capital allocation, finding the insights that actually move the business forward. But instead, you're chasing receipts and categorizing transactions. It's the opposite of leverage. This is exactly why I'm so bullish on what the team
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 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 Rampton Namy. Rampton is the founder of Abstract Ventures, one of the most talked about seed funds in Silicon Valley. What makes Rampton's story so compelling isn't just his firm's track record, including early investments in rippling, Solana, and dozens of unicorns, but the unconventional path he took to get there. From running a hedge fund straight out of high school to filing bankruptcy at 24, then bootstrapping his way to building a $2,000,000,000 assets under management venture firm using AngelList and relentless hustle. Our conversation begins in an unexpected place. Th
I have two incredibly close mentors, one who introduced the two of us, Michael Ovitz, and then another guy named Stewart Peterson. Both of them have world class art collections. Michael has a storied art collection. I'm sure you've seen it. But I spent a lot of time at their houses over the years, and every time I went, I tried to learn a little bit more about what was in their house. They could both spend two, three hours walking you around their home and talking about what they have and how they got it and the story behind it, the history behind it, the significance of it. I always just thou
What made a collection like Ovis's unattainable? Why could you not replicate it? What is shared in common from your perspective of the collections that you respect the most? The reason Ovitz's collection
is not attainable is due to the sheer value of it. There's this one art list that ranks collections based on the means at which they were obtained, which is actually really interesting because people today say Steve Cohen and Ken Griffin have the world's greatest collections, and they probably do, but they don't assign the same score to them because It's like a low IRR collection. Exactly. If you can afford to buy any piece of art in the world, it's easy to know what the 50 most iconic things in the world are. And everything's for sale in the art world. So as long as you're willing to pay the
Is there any interesting thing you've learned about the literal cost of things and what generates return from there?
This has changed dramatically in recent years. Ovid always tells me that he wishes I started my collecting twenty to twenty five years ago versus starting collecting today. And I asked what was different about twenty to twenty five years ago. And he said twenty to twenty five years ago, entry level art was $10,000 Blue chip art, not blue chip Casas and Rothko's, but blue chip contemporary art was in the order of magnitudes of low 100 thousands. Twenty, twenty f
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