Undiscovered and Overlooked Assets: Value Investing in Life

Growing up studying history I’ve always been fascinated by history. Everyone knows about ancient Rome and Greece or the Italian Renaissance or the Napoleonic Wars. I love those periods too. But for me it was the obscure stuff.  

Did you know that Hungary, Poland & the Czech Hussites during the Middle Ages were great military powers? Or Spain's army was unbeatable for several hundred years across Europe?  Or about the Great Latin American war between Paraguay and, well, almost every major country in Latam. Super obscure. 

I wonder sometimes why I am so driven to discover relatively unknown but amazing books, ideas and even places. Kind of like value investing but for life. It's way more fun to be emerging than to be emerged. To find the unobvious. To surface something looking back in retrospect seemed so obvious. This is my juice. 

For travel, yes, I love fairly well known and popular places like Hawaii, Japan, Turkey, Thailand or Argentina. But for me the attraction was always for the overlooked but awesome places. Places like Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, Albania, Taiwan, Finland or Serbia. 

And I love being relatively early before the crowds show up. Case in point I loved Lisbon and Portugal when I first went in 2015. Fast forward to 2024, I find it way too overrun with tourists. It’s lost its interest to me even though it’s still a beautiful place with amazing food. 

Interesting how your curiosity and interests in life bleed into your career and how your career bleeds into your life. 

It’s probably why I was drawn by the art of venture capital. Investing in overlooked geographies, founders and industrial sectors. If you do a deal and everyone thinks it’s a good deal, you probably missed something or are too late. I was early in B2B SaaS & Developer tools in 2014, relatively early in Insurance-tech back in 2015. And it is now definitely still early in the Defense/Militech space & Manufacturing-tech but boy is it exciting. (For all you peacenik critics of this, I don’t like that war and the need for a growing military industry is needed but it is now a reality in a deglobalizing and newly multi-polar world. Quoting Trotsky: “You might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” )

Quoting my friend & legendary seed VC investor Mike Maples Jr. quoting legendary capital investor Dave Swensen: “you want your portfolio to be uncomfortably idiosyncratic.” Or put another way, you want to be misunderstood which usually equates to being very very early in the tech and consumer trend game. 

This is the only way to generate real returns and alpha. It’s easier said than done as it requires conviction and courage to move against the crowd. You also need to be comfortable having haters and doubters. But if you have a clear thesis on the future and have done your homework, stick with it and give it the time until the market moves your way. Magic eventually happens.