#125 - Interview with Mohnish Pabrai

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"The two skills of modern business: storytelling and spreadsheets. Know the numbers, craft the narrative." - James Clear

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Episode #11 - Mohnish Pabrai, CEO of Pabrai Funds, Founder of Dakshana Foundation

I had the pleasure of interviewing Mohnish Pabrai recently for episode #11 of the Circle of Competence podcast. In our conversation, we hit everything from Mohnish's investment framework to his work in the social investing space:

- reflections on a person's internal 'mapping' and what makes each one of us 'tick'

- 'entrepreneurship as arbitrage'

- Mohnish's early days of entrepreneurship with TransTech and his best investment ever

- Mohnish's investment framework

- Mohnish's lessons learned in 2020

- Mohnish's book list

- Mohnish's amazing work with the Dakshana Foundation, which seeks to invest in the education of promising youth in India and 'break the shackles of poverty permanently.'

I'd highly recommend checking out his personal website, Chai with Pabrai, for all of his book recommendations, past interviews, and books he's authored. Mohnish is a wealth of information when it comes to investing and business history. Our conversation illustrated his ability to adapt over time, digest huge amounts of information, and make clear decisions based on the available data. I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did!

LINKS

Investing

How Cathie Wood beat Wall Street with her Tesla bet (Forbes)

Hindenburg Research's short thesis on Loop Industries (Hindenburg Research)

Howard Marks' latest memo (Howard Marks, Oaktree Capital)

Why are so many unprofitable companies the best performing stocks this year? (Ben Carlson)

A tool for tracking SPACs (SpacTrack)

The bankruptcy blues (David Martin)

Chris Bloomstran's letter to Disney (Semper Augustus)

Technology

The tech startup trying to restore our faith in COVID-free air travel (Fortune)

Strategy in a post-fixed costs economy (Ben Robinson)

'Too complex' is the new 'too big to fail' - big tech's case (Christopher Mims)

The Nobel Prize is just one front on the fascinating CRISPR wars (Defector)

Amazon just revealed its first all electric delivery vehicle (Amazon)

Radiative cooling technology offers new tech for a hotter earth (Clean Technica)

The end of the American internet (Benedict Evans)

The cold war rocket expert Elon Musk called when he wanted to go to Mars (The Hustle)

Real Estate

View The Space gives a real-time look at office market demand and supply (The Real Deal)

Commercial real estate: what to invest in today (Wharton)

Geopolitics & Economics

Inside the US campaign to cut China out of the tech supply chain (Nikkei Asia)

Central bank digital currencies (Bank of Canada)

Climate change - how do we know? (NASA)

Rewiring America - a field manual for climate change (Saul Griffith)

The uninhabitable earth (David Wallace-Wells)

How to overthrow a government (Rense.com)