Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari

28:00Listen, there's more uncertainty in the world than usual. And predicting the macro is hard. when faced with uncertainty diversify globally diversify and focus on the highest quality companies and the uncertainty becomes less determinant to your fate predicting the US politics for the next four weeks is impossible for the next six months is even harder so please don't take me there the solution to the uncertainty is diversification and quality makes a lot of sense you have described your favorite business model to invest in as we like beautiful business models what makes a business model beautiful yeah uh you have to capture gross margin you have to sell the unit you produce at a markup to what the cost of production is the bigger the margin the more beautiful you are now the beauty that's a picture of beauty what's really relevant about beauties is lifetime beauty.

29:04Is that gross margin defensible? Or will it be eroded away by the competitors that see your beautiful gross margins? And the real question about that is the durability of the beauty. And you get durability when you have moat. And you get moat when you have economies of scale, economies of scope, learning externalities, network effects, agility. What are the conditions that this team has to create gross margin and build a humongous, beautiful moat that allows us to be a lifetime gross margin, hopefully an increasing gross margin. How do you evaluate those things? A lot of those items you checked off don't show up in a balance sheet.

29:45How do you figure out what managers or models are agile? It helps when you're specialized in a business model. So one of our power alleys is investment management. And I'll tell you one long story to bring a power ally to life. In the mid-90s, we looked at the wealth management industry in the United States, and it was 80 % concentrated in retail banks. The guy that was selling you the mortgage, the checking account was also selling your 401k and your brokerage. And the fees were high and the service was poor. We took the bet that 80 % would come down. And sure enough, over the following decade, 80 % came down to 10%.

30:23They were disrupted by Schwab, Ameritrade, E-Trade, Fidelity, Vanguard. We invested in E-Trade 27 times multiple within seven years. Sold to Morgan Stanley a couple of years ago. Eventually sold to Morgan Stanley, long after we were gone. In 2012, when I started at GA, we looked at the Brazilian market. And the four retail banks had 99 % share. And we said, this smells like something we've seen before. We backed one of the disruptors. 99 % dropped to 78%. This company multiplied itself 100 times. We've done the same thing in India with IFL Wealth, in China with FUTU. We're doing it again in New Mexico with CLAR.

31:05So a lot of this future telling is pattern recognition. And the more you have done in a power alley, the easier it is to recognize these patterns. Hi, I'm Stephen Carroll. And I'm Caroline Hepker, We're here to introduce you to a podcast that brings you the news you need to start your day in just 15 minutes. It's called Bloomberg Daybreak Europe Edition, covering all the top stories across Europe and around the world. Each weekday morning, we're up early to bring you the latest news by 7am. We've got everything you need to know from geopolitics and global events to economics and what's moving markets.

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32:17So I'm fascinated by not only General Atlantic's global footprint, but your international experience. How did your upbringing in Bolivia and your entrepreneurship in Brazil influence this career path you've taken? Bolivia taught me about chaos. Brazil taught me about profiting from chaos. So one of the interesting experiences is at the darkest moment of the night when Submarino was almost bankrupt, I decided I had almost lost hope at emerging markets investing. And I decided, like I typically do, to treat it like a research project. And I convinced a professor from Harvard to do a project with me where we studied 10 incredible Brazilian companies that had thrived in the 90s and become multi-billion dollar corporations and compared them to 10 competitors of theirs that didn't thrive.

33:12And we took it. We did 500 interviews. We wrote this book, which I gave you a copy of, and I hope you'll enjoy it. And the big insight is that in moments of chaos, there is a once in a generation opportunity to do a transformational change to your business. And the masters of this, and there's 10 examples in the book, but the master of this is the 3G guys. And what the 3G guys set out to do is what I call spearfishing. And they actually physically are spearfishers. They go on the weekend. And the beauty of spearfishing, which I've done since, is you don't swim towards the fish. You choose an area full of fish.

33:48You dive down without a tank, just you under your spear, and you hold your breath for three to five minutes waiting for the fat fish. And then when he appears, you have two seconds to make the kill. And that's what they do. And their journey was – so they're investment bankers. They had the number one investment bank in Brazil, too much cash. They wanted real assets. They were hunting for a large asset that had characteristics of an industry that would benefit once inflation stopped. That was their bet. And they waited, they waited, they waited. And a week before a momentous election, the Swiss owners of the number two beer company panicked and they sold their business in two days.

34:28They bought it. Big fish. Then they waited 10 years. They made that business really profitable, really efficient. And then another crisis, when the number one beer company was in difficulties, they pounced again. And they did it again 20 years later when Anheuser-Busch was in the great crisis of the great financial crisis, and they struck globally. So this idea that in moments of chaos, there's opportunities to do once in a generation 10x bets is an insight that has allowed me to navigate the volatility in all the emerging markets, because chaos visits more frequently the emerging markets. So we've seen some growth in emerging markets over the past few years.

35:10What are the areas? I know you're focused on some of the megatrends, but what parts of the world are you looking at? What's attractive outside of the United States for the half of General Lenick that's not domestic? Yeah, listen, what we've tried to do in the emerging markets is to focus on the big problems. Turns out there are bigger problems in the emerging markets. And if you can find a digital solution to a big problem, you're likely going to be able to build a beautiful business. With gross margin, that has a moat. So renting an apartment, we were just talking before about the rental market, it's hard in the US.

35:50In Brazil, it's almost impossible because 80 % of the listings are fake. They're just a broker trying to get you, oh, that one just sold, but let me show you three other ones that I have. Buying a used car is hard in the United States. In Mexico, you may discover what you bought is not actually a car. So if you create a platform that creates a transactional platform, education, huge problems in education. If you create a supplier that provides a digital curriculum, we now have a company in Brazil that teaches 3 million kids a day with a digital curriculum that's self-learning using AI, blah, blah, blah.

36:24So big problem, big solution. Another one, for example, turns out Brazil and Mexico are number one and number two in the world in fraud, an identity fraud. We are absolutely world-class fraudsters in my neck of the woods. We have two companies, one focused in Mexico, one focused in Brazil, that use biometrics to zero out all fraud with tremendous impact on financial inclusion. So our North Star for most of what we do in the emerging markets is to find digital solutions to these big problems and hopefully profit that way. I'm fascinated by the concept of biometrics of fraud and digital solution.

37:00And I want to roll back to what you said previously about India. And it sounds like the government putting in a set of biometric standards and then building out a digital mobile solution, not only does it put some power in the hand of the consumers, at the same time, that's very trackable and they could collect taxes on whatever's going on. Is that the model for what you're seeing in Mexico and Brazil, or are they very different issues? Same issue, private solution, not a public solution. But it addresses to one of the core beliefs I have, which is a lot of the inefficiency and poverty outside the U.S.

37:50is there is no meritocracy. biometrics allows for a meritocracy you can have a track record you pay your taxes you show your formal you can borrow against it if you pay your loans it is trackable your interest rate comes down if your interest rate comes down you can borrow and you can send your kid to a better college so this idea of you know taking friction away and bringing meritocracy forward is so mission critical and so unlocking of value that it's very exciting to be able to back the rails of that. And India has been a role model on this. All right. So we've talked about India. We've talked about Mexico.

38:29We've talked about Brazil. What other parts of the world look interesting? Do you do stuff in Asia? What do you do in Africa? Listen, Africa is the next frontier. We've done two initial investments in Africa. It's still 10 years away from growth equity. The rule of law still needs to work. We just opened offices in the Middle East. The Gulf economy is vibrant. Entrepreneurship is thriving. Southeast Asia is having a pickup. We're beginning to do more work in Japan. The next generation of Japan is rediscovering its innovation roots that it had in the 90s, but lost for 30 years. So all these places are very exciting.

39:06Now, the US is incredibly exciting. It's half of what we do. It is transformational. It's leading the AI revolution. AI is the defining, incredible revolution of this generation of 25-year-olds. And that's also very exciting. It's probably one of the most exciting new power alleys is what we see going on in AI. It makes sense that Africa is still not quite where it needs to be. But I'm kind of intrigued by other parts of Asia and Japan. Japan just feels like it's years ahead of everybody. It just feels like the future has arrived in Japan before it makes it to everywhere else. What sort of opportunities are you seeing in Japan?

39:49They feel like a pretty mature Western-style democratic brand of capitalism. Yeah. Somehow Japan lost its innovation edge it had in the 90s. And it had to do with a generation that was not embracing of rapid change. and there's a new generation of managers that are embracing rapid change. They don't yet have a growth equity industry, but they're great in software, they're great in financial services, they're great in gaming. So I think it's early, but I do see a lot of innovation out of Japan. In Southeast Asia, Vietnam is super exciting. It's a net beneficiary of supply chain diversification away from China.

40:32It is incredibly entrepreneurial. is incredibly young. We've made investments in the financial services sector. We're right now looking at something in the healthcare sector. That's also very exciting. So for a long time, every time Japan comes up, someone always brings up, they have big demographic problems. They can't get out of the way. And I'm hearing similar things about China. How do you look at those issues, which are large and macro and somewhat intractable? that's a tough one I think the aging of the west creates a number of opportunities for healthcare services it will be mission critical and I think we have to invest in making sure we work on the health span issue, how they solve those issues, my crystal ball is not perfect, I am a big believer in immigration, the reason the United States is not suffering from the same issues is we've had very healthy legal immigration for the last 30 years, and that's refreshed and populated half the unicorns.

41:33So I suspect part of the answer of the sort of West that's aging is flexibilizing immigration. Right. We've been pretty receptive to it. It looks like we know Japan has almost no permanent resident immigrants. The UK is turning away from it. Is this going to just be an opportunity for countries that open up their doors to the best and the brightest? Or is this an ongoing source of political fodder for left versus right? So this is a topic my sister cares really a lot about. She's dedicated her life to it. She was most recently at the National Security Council focused on immigration. Yes, I was just in Dubai two weeks ago.

42:19It's a different Dubai. Some of the brightest minds of Europe have moved to Dubai, attracted by the vibrant metropolis that's setting up there, their low tax jurisdictions, low bureaucracy, whereas the rest of Europe is taxing and making immigration harder and ending the non-dumb. Some countries, like Dubai, like Singapore, are opening up to the world and attracting the world's best talent. Soon enough, we'll wake up and say, hey, the United States can't lose this edge. I hope it does. I'm kind of fascinated by the transition that's taken place, not just in Dubai, but through large parts of the Middle East that seem to be shifting from, you know, oil regimes and and plutocracies to much more, I don't say open societies, but certainly economic freer societies than they've been in the past.

43:12What is going on in the Middle East to drive these changes? Brilliant governance and the advantage of having seen so many natural resource-rich countries squander it away with Dutch disease. I think they've got religion. Dutch disease? You remember? Sure. They got religion and they're making the right levels of investments. And there's so much innovation. We just invested in a company called Kayali. It's a perfume brand. It's a beautiful entrepreneur who's created this concept, which was new to me. It turns out the Gen C likes to do layering of perfumes, which is to combine three, four, five perfumes and create your own blend.

43:52And she's built her whole brand around this. And it's a global brand born in the Middle East. How exciting is that? So I think we're going to see more and more innovation out of the Middle East. And I think they're doing a lot of things right. Some of the investments you've made over the years almost sound like venture capital investments as opposed to private equity. So social media, perfume, consumer goods. What is the line between VC and growth equity? Yeah. We come in when you're profitable and scaled. And the risk we're taking is not whether you have product market fit, but whether you can really scale to your full potential.

44:34Our loss ratios, the sort of percent of the time in which we lose money, is 3 % to 4 % for the last. So it's the opposite. It's totally inverted. Venture is 30%, 40%. I think it's even higher than that. It's even higher. So we come in when you are a late teenager, not when you are a thriving young kid, wizard kid. Gotcha. So it sounds like, given that half of your investing is outside of the United States, you think there are tailwinds for growth markets, for emerging markets. It's what are going to be the big drivers for gains in these companies overseas and in emerging markets. Listen, I think AI is the revolution that we were talking about.

45:18Unlike the Internet or the mobile Internet or the cloud, this one is truly transformational because it will touch about 80 % of GDP. The previous waves touched between 10 % and 20%. This is a 4x bigger wave. Every process we throw AI to gets 30 % to 40 % more efficient. In today's version of AI, which will be outdated in about three weeks. So programmers are more effective. Online marketing teams spend 30 % less. Call centers don't need any humans. Decision making enhanced with a bot is better. So the proof points are already there. and we're asking all our businesses, how will AI fundamentally change your business model and get ahead of it?

46:05Investing in AI, which is one of the things we're doing, we stayed away from the infrastructure layer, sort of data in the growth equity program, data centers, large language models, chips, capital intensive, some technology risk that's hard to price. We've been focused on the application layer, Sort of software companies that are using proprietary data and AI to provide a new service. And for the last four years, we met 800 companies, and it was venture stage. And the valuations were growth equity stage. So bad combination. Finally, in the last six months, their growth equity stage. And we've just done three major investments on AI.

46:46And I think we'll do dozens. Give us what are the three investments you've just made in AI. So let me tell you about this company called Insider. It's a software company, enterprise marketing software companies. It helps companies deliver the right message to the right person at the right time in the right media. This company was founded in Turkey. Turkey has two things going for it. Number one, huge gaming community and huge gaming programmer community. So there's lots of programming talent. And because it's kind of in Asia, but it's also in Europe, its population uses WeChat and WhatsApp. So they developed great software that really worked with instant messaging for both the West and the East.

47:26And they used this edge to develop clients in Europe and in Asia. It's now a$130 million business, growing very fast, profitable. The huge opportunity is the U.S. market. It turns out the U.S. market is only now discovering instant messaging. We still send emails to companies to inquire about our orders. The rest of the world does not remember what it's like to email a company. Really? That's so interesting. We all use WeChat or WhatsApp. Now there's, we think, a window to bring Insider to the United States. U.S. is half the market, but only 7 % of Insider sales. We're really strong in the United States.

48:01We're going to help them grow. So that's Insider. Another company is VI Labs, using AI for behavioral interventions, helping the diabetics stay to their medication, helping gym goers go to the gym, reducing churn, all using AI to provide behavioral nudges. Israeli entrepreneur in the U.S., building in the U.S. And the fourth one is a Chilean founder, scholarship kit to NYU. He's created a text-to-video program. You describe a scene, it produces the video. Unlike ChatGBT, he trained it with permission, so he has copyright rights, which it turns out, if you're in the image business, kind of important.

48:40Taking off like fire. and a super friendly, energized community builder of a team. And it's a company called Runway.ai, which I think will change the industry. Runway.ai. All right, so those are three pretty big investments. It sounds like, and you've specifically said, you're not doing chips, you're not doing data centers, you're not doing all the capital intensive things. You know, I've been fond of saying it's not the Magnificent Seven. It's the other 493 companies in the S &P 500 that are going to see benefits from this. So far, it seems like it's kind of few and far between. How long does an innovation like AI take to make its way out into the broader economy?

49:31The hope, the wishful thinking is, hey, everybody becomes more productive, more efficient, more profitable, supports higher stock prices. What is the timeline like? And I know you don't have a crystal ball, but you're immersed in this. How do you see this unfolding? It's rapid. It's accelerating. But it's human nature to be disappointed by the short-term trajectory and wowed by how deep it is five years from now. Like any exponential, we have a hard time imagining the power of exponentials. In five years, it is going to be massive and penetrated. Whether the next 12 months disappoint, I am sure they will disappoint.

50:12That's really interesting. When you're thinking about a disruptive technology like AI and making investments, is it about the addressable market? Is it about how global it can be? What's on your checklist? Funny you mentioned checklist. So we do have a checklist. But let me tell you a story of the GA checklist. So when I became chairman of the investment committee seven years ago, I felt grossly unqualified because my experience is primarily emerging markets. And, you know, half of what we do is develop markets. So I went to the co-founders of the firm, Steve Denning and Dave Hudson. Incredible minds.

50:52These guys ran the firm for the first 25 years. Incredible returns. Geniuses. And I went to Steve and Steve was CEO for 25 years. He's a former Navy captain, McKinsey trained, very, very structured. And he says, Martin, you need to build a checklist. Look at our deals, our best performing deals. I'll share the three M's and we'll talk about the three M's and other characteristics. And then look at the money losers and grade a negative checklist. And for God's sake, please produce the GA checklist. I said, okay, checklist. Same day, I go to Dave Hodgson. Dave Hudson, Pi Beta Kappa, Dartmouth, Stanford, programmer, genius, 200 IQ plus.

51:36Every time he speaks, I have to shut my eyes and try to make sure I capture what he's saying. And the first thing he says is resist the temptation to have a checklist. If it was as simple as a checklist, we wouldn't be paid two and 20 to make the application or the checklist. And I was like, oh, my God, the two guys that ran the firm for 25 years can't agree on how to make an investment decision. Truth is, and I did some research on this, you know, Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow is a checklist manifesto. But even the author of Thinking Fast and Danny Calliman, he stumbled into the checklist, creating the checklist for interviewers for the Israeli Defense Force elite units.

52:17And he used the checklist. but after I found out and it was not in the book purposely there were these super interviewers that applied the checklist and had not an 85 % accurate rate but a 99 % accurate turns out that's a big difference and it's best captured by this woman who was sort of the master prognosticator and what she would say is listen I do the work I do the checklist and before I make a decision I close the notebook and see how I feel in my gut So the educated gut is the way to make complex decisions. So you and I have talked about this in the past, but let's bring that up. You know, people talk about investing as part art, part science.

53:06What you've said is it's a combination of the gut and the brain, which I think is roughly the same. how do you know when you're using your brain and when you have to defer to your gut? We talked about George Soros' back pains as effectively his gut overrunning his brain. How do you balance the two? Listen, you have to ignore the gut until you do your homework. Do the work. Do the analysis. Do the customer segmentation. Do the financial. Do the market survey. Do this competitor survey. Do the cost analysis. After you've fed the gut with all that data, then you listen to the system one gut, which is 3 million years old, because it's likely to lead you in the right direction.

53:56The gut is wise if you give it the right inputs. If you let the gut guide you before you do the work, you're likely to make mistakes. So let me throw you a couple of curveballs before we get to our favorite questions. what drew you to Lincoln Center how do you contribute to its mission you also work with Primera Chance and with the Endeavor mentorship tell us a little bit about those sort of interests so listen I believe wealth is a unit of energy and if you just hoard it you feel stuffy slow and it's not good energy it's got to be in motion so I run a concentrated book in my philanthropy. I put my time and my wealth on a couple of things.

54:43I care deeply about education, scholarships. I care deeply about entrepreneurship. And I care deeply about music. Why do I care about music? The cancer of our generation is tribalism in society. And to combat tribalism, I don't believe we should censor hate speech, but we should promote love speech. And the best form of love speech is live music. When we're in a room vibing to the same tune, breathing the same air, listening the O's, the Ah's, and the singing to the same artist. We're all together. There's no racial. There's no income differential. There's no country differential. We're all vibing to the same music.

55:20So with Lincoln Center, it's about music. With Endeavor, it's about promoting entrepreneurship across the globe by creating role models and mentorships. And I've been doing that for 22 years. I'm now on the global board trying to take this into even more countries. and then scholarships. Primera Chance, and I do it also with Harvard, I do it also with my high school in Bolivia, talent is sprinkled globally. Find those perils wherever they are. Primera Chance is quite interesting. It turns out the Brazilian public education system tests kids in the math Olympics when they're 13. And they only use this data to provide five kids to come meet the president and they all get married.

56:01Five. Yeah, they choose five. There's a lot of data about some other kids. So what Primeira Chansa does is it goes to rural Northeast. This is the poorest area of Brazil, the most unfair in the world, finds these 13-year-old geniuses and helps them get into good high schools in major cities and eventually get into great colleges. So that's one of the interventions on the education sector. My last curveball question has to do with something you said about when you were an undergraduate picking up some extra cash bartending and you actually bartended at a Harvard Business School reunion. Tell us a little bit about that experience.

56:46I kind of really like that story. So I was 18 years old. I bartended at all sorts of reunions. And the most interesting reunions were the 25th and 30th reunion from both the college and the business school. because in both, I used to have a name tag and it said my name, Bolivia, and how old I was. I think there were like 30 people that came up, some of them drunk, look at me, some of them touch my cheek. I said, you're so young. Please enjoy it. Soon you'll be me. And it will be a flicker of a turn of an eyelid. It will be a second and you'll be me. And I had forgotten this story. It was odd at the time.

57:26I thought it was a little awkward. I was at my 30th reunion and there was this young woman from Finland who was 17 years old and I went up to her and said oh please do enjoy your life because it flows by in a second and then I remembered I was her a second ago the big insight and it takes us to get to the old age to fully appreciate it if you take stock what percent of your mental time are you in the past and are you in the future and for a lot of young people 70 % of their time is not in the present and if you want to savor life and breathe and savor the air you're breathing you need 80 % of your mental time to be here now today with you and the sooner you get there I mean Confucius has this great line he says every man has two lives the second one starts when you recognize you only have one and I just wish people get to that realization in their 30s, not in their 50s, when they're going to their 30th reunion.

58:31Really interesting. The days are long, but the decades are short. Exactly. I've always been a fan of that. All right, so let's jump to our favorite questions that we ask, starting with what's keeping you entertained these days? What are you watching or listening to? White Lotus is a household favorite. I love Mike White. He is a sophisticated storyteller. This so far seems to be the best season of the three. I don't know what your experience was. I know people love the first season. I love the second season because I got the Latin flair going for me. Right. But this one is keeping up. This one just feels to be, no spoilers, I hated the ending of the second season.

59:14Not the outcome, just the way they did it. They could have reached the same conclusion in a less annoying fashion, but especially Thailand is so fascinating the way this is unfolding but it's been really interesting it's gorgeous and I'm a big fan of Mike White a great way I connect with my teenage daughter is watching Saturday Night Live not just the current but the old Lorne Michaels is a genius he stayed fresh for 50 years and a great way to cross the intergenerational gap is to show that us old people were once young and our humor was actually kind of edgy. We're not just these old farts that we've grown to be.

59:56Once upon a time, our generation had it shot. So that's something else I spend time. Every generation thinks the people who came before them didn't have a childhood. And then suddenly it's like, oh, I get it. Like you have to kind of live it to realize, oh, okay, I was a little quick to judge back then. Exactly. Let's talk about mentors who helped influence and shape your career. Listen, I've had the pleasure of working with six great investors. The guys at 3G, some people at Advent, Steve, Dave, and Bill Ford at GA. And having sat in three different investment committees, there's a game I used to play, which is every unique investor has a perspective that frames their worldview.

1:00:39I would try to learn and predict what they're going to say in the investment committee. And the moment I got to 80 % accuracy, I was like, okay, I get it. I got it. I get it how Steve Denning thinks. I get it how Bill Ford thinks. And my investment style is a mixture of all these six great investors that I had the honor of working with. And I hope I am utterly unpredictable when someone tries to do this to me. Because I hope my worldview is fluid enough that it cannot be predicted at the 80 % accuracy level that I was able to do. So let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading right now?

1:01:21So there are three books that changed my life. As a 20-year-old, I read Tony Robbins' Awaken the Giant Within. I know it's cheesy. I know it's self-help. It is fabulous. People love it. It is fabulous. It's about controlling your emotion and charting your own destiny. As a hungry 20-year-old, it calmed the hell out of me. Really? It was life changing. And I am forever grateful to Tony. And I am a big proponent. And he's an incredible human being. I am reluctant to call things cheesy where there is a groundswell of support and just endless testimonials like you just gave that said, hey, you may not love this, but this really helped me through this challenge and I'm better for it.

1:02:08So I don't know. I think it's a little too blase, too glib to just say, oh, it's cheesy. What did that book sell? Like 10 million copies? 10 million copies. If you've never met him, see I'm Not Your Guru at Netflix, and you'll get a chance to feel his energy. Oh, really? He's amazing. You should totally see that. I'm Not Your Guru. All right. I'm going to put that on my list. What are the other two books? So Viktor Frankl, Man in Search of Purpose. I've read it five times in my life. My purpose keeps changing. And then we talked about this. I really am a fan of Ginger Scan and the making of the modern world.

1:02:41It was a super interesting book because it defied the stereotype that this was a savage, ruthless conqueror. He was an incredibly sophisticated man that built the largest empire built in space. Bigger than the Roman Empire. Bigger than the Roman, bigger than the Ottoman. Only the British had a bigger empire. And he had rule of law. He was meritocratic. He embraced diversity. He invested in the arts. He was pro-trade. He was pro-interchange of ideas and built something unheard of at the time. Before technology, it was 17 % of the world's land under one empire that a single man, an orphan, a nomad, built in the 1200s.

1:03:26Beautiful. arguably not just a military genius, but a governmental societal genius able to not just conquer, but keep the empire together, which is always the challenge. The Romans spread themselves too thin. You could say the same about the Spanish empire or the British empire. He managed to maintain this throughout his entire life. And lived to the ripe age of 65, twice the life expectancy of his era. Which is pretty impressive. Our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in either growth equity or investing or anything along those lines?

1:04:11As I think of the 12 junctures where I had to make life-changing career choices, I always took the most adventurous route. Choose the most adventurous route. and don't do it alone. Bring someone along. Don't play it safe. Don't play it safe. At the end of the day, he who has the best stories wins. And before I interrupted, you were about to say, bring someone along with you? Bring someone along. And there's two points, like Robert Frost and Walt Whitman. Robert's first journey, the road less traveled, is a lonely journey. Walt Whitman's is about opening the road and bringing, extend out a hand and he says, I give you my love.

1:04:57Bring someone you love along. And the most important decision in a man's life or a woman's life is who your life partner is. Bring someone along on this adventure because it's twice as fun if you can reminisce in your old age about all the great twists and turns that life throws behind you. And our final question, what do you know about the world of investing today you wish you knew 30 or so years ago when you were first getting started? from Warren Buffett you only have 20 slots in your life as a investor wait for the big fish don't waste them on marginal opportunities you don't eat mark to market only cash on cash counts and the final one if you think like the crowd you're destined to mediocrity you're destined to perform like the crowd really interesting thanks Martin for being so generous with your time.

1:05:52We have been speaking with Martin Escobar. He is co-president and head of global growth equity at General Atlantic. The firm manages over$100 billion in assets. If you enjoy this conversation, well, be sure and check out any of the past 550 we've had over the previous 10 and a half years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Bloomberg, wherever you find your favorite podcasts. And be sure and check out my new book, How Not to Invest, The Ideas, Numbers, and Behavior That Destroys Wealth. Out now, wherever you find your favorite books. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps with these conversations together each week.

1:06:41Steve Gonzalez is my audio engineer. Sean Russo is my head of research. Anna Luke is my producer. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

1:07:08This is Scarlett Fu. And I'm Paul Sweeney, inviting you to join us for the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast. Every day, we harness the power of Bloomberg Intelligence to bring you deep dives into the companies that are moving markets from publicly traded companies like Apple to those that are privately owned but known by everyone on Earth, like OpenAI. Now, I helped to build Bloomberg Intelligence to what it is today, Scarlett. And now our analysts are the best in the world, covering more than 2 ,000 global companies. That is your legacy, Paul. And we speak to those in-house experts every day. They are Bloomberg's go-to authorities on sectors, companies, and legal processes.

1:07:40And we do it all live each weekday, then bring you the best conversations in our daily podcast. So be sure to search for Bloomberg Intelligence on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen. Listen in the afternoons on your way home from work to catch up on the market news you missed during the business day. That is the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast. I'm Scarlett Fu. And I'm Paul Sweeney. Subscribe today wherever you get your podcasts.