Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447]
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 PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
My guest today is my friend Wolfgang Hammer. Wolfgang is a successful film producer and executive who helped create House of Cards and ran several major studios, including Lionsgate, CBS Films, and Miramax. He's now building a new kind of film studio with support from Mitch Lasky and Marc Andreessen. Wolfgang also helps founders and CEOs use storytelling to better understand what they do and why it matters. In many ways, this conversation is a manual for how to find that story and communicate it in a way that resonates. Wolfgang shares the questions and tools he gives leaders to help them do t
There's a thing in character development where the character at the beginning of a story will have a concept of the world that they believe is fixed, and it's very often a flawed concept. This is always attributable to a lack of self knowledge. And I think with the case of a great founder who feels that they're building something that's working, and then they feel that perhaps the way they're thinking about the context wherein this product lives is limited. With big companies sometimes they have a product that perhaps is not as good anymore as it used to be, and that the conception of the worl
When you talk to someone about this like self knowledge exploration or something, is the thing you're after the underlying reason that they themselves may not know yet why they're doing what they're doing? Does it boil down to that?
The way I think of it is, story works in three layers. One, there's the external mechanics of how the character interacts in the world and you can substitute character for product. That's a requirement and in the case of technology, it's technical. You gotta have something that works. And then there are two more layers, which is a subjective layer of why is this series of events important to me and what does it mean to me personally? And then there is a philosophical layer, and on a philosophical level, it's probably where you try to find out, and you have to steel man this, and it's very easy
I wanna just like drill on these three layers of the story and try to turn it into a device that someone could like take away from this and try to apply to themselves. If I'm listening and I'm curious about, I'll just keep it grounded in business, like the story of my business at these three levels, is there a good question that I could ask, like prompt myself with to get at the external, the emotional, and the philosophical? Can you think of a question for each?
I think the external would be what are we doing? What are we making? What are we selli
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