Chamath, to my audience which are largely entrepreneurs and people who want to start a business in India, I think something that you have accomplished along the many things that you have done in life, from starting at Facebook which is now Meta to running funds, managing money, the thing I find most interesting because I'm in that profession is the investing bit. You seem to have gotten so many calls right over the tenure of your career. Give us some lessons from that which are non-obvious.
To be a very successful investor, you have to be extremely, extremely single-minded. You need to come to your own conclusions. You cannot have others help you. It is not a team sport. That is probably the single most important thing. Whenever I see teams of investors, I think these idiots are going to lose money or they're going to make a lot of noise and spend a lot of time and waste a bunch of people's money just returning the market beta. I don't find that interesting. That's not being a good investor.
You have to be really, really, really curious. And people say that a lot. The sensation that I can put my finger on is when I feel like I'm embarrassed to tell somebody that I'm in this new thing. I remember when I invested in an NBA team in 2011, the people around me were up in arms. My family office was up in arms. My best friends were up in arms. My wife at the time up in arms. Why are you doing this? This makes no sense. And I said, here's what. And you know, it's almost as if what I've learned actually in my career is when people around you have that reaction, it's almost the best signal.
And I had been reading a lot and I've been reading about how to actually be a tech investor. And the conclusion that I came to was, wow, the approach that I want to do is so unconventional. The risk of ruin was very high. So then I was like, well, let me just find the most totally uncorrelated asset and park, I can't remember, it was like 25 or 40 million bucks or something, so that if I lose everything, I still have this little thing and I can take care of myself. And that ended up being the investment in the Warriors, which ended up doing financially quite well.
But it repeated itself with Bitcoin in 2012. I did the same thing. People got, they were just so upset and I remember, you know, I would appear every now and then on like CNBC and just the vitriol and the hatred. And I was like, so if you can wither the negative reactions of others, where is that coming from? It has nothing to do with you, right? People are living their own journey. But what is happening in that moment? What is happening is something you are saying is attacking a core foundational belief that they have and it is touching such a nerve that they are just reflexively reacting. That is an incredible signal because what it tells you is you're on to something. It could still be a huge zero, but you now can bucket it into that there is the potential for a massive asymmetric outcome.
Because what it tells you is you're on to something.
So when I'm investing, initially what I was thinking about was how do I put myself in a position once I've... so I spend like still two, three hours reading a day. I would develop views. I would write notes. I would think about it and then I would come up with these ideas and then I would just test them out. And man, people would just, when people reacted like 'ho-hum', I was like, okay, this is a nothing burger. Not interesting. But when people had like this visceral reaction, I was like, I'm on to something. Doesn't mean I'm right, but it's something that triggers people. And I would use that as a way to amplify and spend more time.
Since then, I've added one more thing to this, which is now I have a different way of investing for large quantum money, like super large quantum, hundreds of millions plus. There, I actually want consensus because this should not be about any sort of existential risk or product risk of any kind. So when you're investing tens of millions of dollars, who cares? You can lose the money. It's not a big deal. When you're investing hundreds of millions or billions, you cannot afford to lose it. Risk of ruin goes up. So now I try to like context switch here. I want you to just be, I want you to just hate it. I want you to just be, 'That's so gross. It's rat poison.' Oh, really? Okay, great. I'm now going to spend more time over here. Oh, that makes, yeah, okay, that I understand.
Which portfolio did better?
Gross tonnage of dollars, this one. Sheer alpha, this one. The non-obvious thing is it's a you thing. Investing is all about you and you only. All this nonsense of like teams is nonsense.
Teams, how big is your investment team? Your family office.
It is one person that makes the investment decisions, which is me, and then there's a very trusted team of people that help me with all of the infrastructure of that, the complexity of that.
Okay. So you think number one then, so you, I'm just summarizing. Yeah. You, nobody else, no team, nobody in the front office other than you.
Two, have a very thoughtful understanding of what you're looking for when you're constructing a portfolio.
