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Michael Mauboussin

Head of Consilient Research, Counterpoint Global · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

analystauthoracademicinvestor@mjmauboussin ↗LinkedIn ↗michaelmauboussin.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Michael Mauboussin is Head of Consilient Research at Counterpoint Global and an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School. He is known for his research on decision-making, capital allocation, skill versus luck, and analyzing competitive moats.

35statements → 15claims → 11claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.83/5average certainty → 2/5average debate potential → 4.4/5argument clarity · the sources → 6said about them ↓

11 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 15 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 13 assertions · 1 opinion · 19 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 15 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 11 are resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Michael argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Mauboussin: Venture capital continues to have high performance persistence
“If you look across asset classes, the asset class that continues to have high persistence is actually venture capital.”
Michael Mauboussin Nov 4, 2022 ▶ 6:05 Michael Mauboussin: The Single Biggest Mistake Investors Make In Decision-Making | 20VC #945 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.4 / 5 directness 4.6 · coherence 4.7 · precision 4.1 · compression 3.9

redirected or did not address 1 of 44 assessed questions (2%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

275 words/min while actually speaking · 14.3 um and uh per 1k words · 17.4 false starts per 1k · 36.5% of pauses land inside a clause

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 9,229 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 4/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 1/10
setup questions received 65%

Everything Michael Mauboussin said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Supported
Mauboussin: Literature proves people are bad at forecasting macro events
“There is a large literature demonstrating that people are not good at forecasting those things.”
Michael Mauboussin Nov 4, 2022 ▶ 35:12 Michael Mauboussin: The Single Biggest Mistake Investors Make In Decision-Making | 20VC #945 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mauboussin: The 1987 Crash Appears Minor on Long-Term Charts
“And then I would encourage you now to look at a long-term stock price chart and go find the crash of 1987 on there and look at it and see like how significant it is. Right. So the, at the time it seemed to be very profound at the time it was earth shattering. …”
Michael Mauboussin Nov 4, 2022 ▶ 36:51 Michael Mauboussin: The Single Biggest Mistake Investors Make In Decision-Making | 20VC #945 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Mauboussin: Financial Market Volatility Empirically Clusters in Bunches
“Empirically in finance, we know that's not true. That we know that volatility and shocks tend to come in bunches, right? So, so you get quiet periods interspersed with periods of great volatility, then quiet and volatility and so forth.”
Michael Mauboussin Nov 4, 2022 ▶ 38:24 Michael Mauboussin: The Single Biggest Mistake Investors Make In Decision-Making | 20VC #945 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Mauboussin: US stock volatility in 1920s-1930s far exceeded recent financial crisis
“Go back and look at volatility. And, you know, you see that the volatility we've seen in the last 10 or 15 years, even including the financial crisis, really doesn't hold a candle to the volatility we saw in the 19 twenties and thirties in the United States. T…”
Michael Mauboussin Nov 4, 2022 ▶ 40:30 Michael Mauboussin: The Single Biggest Mistake Investors Make In Decision-Making | 20VC #945 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Mauboussin: Solving complex problems requires combining multiple disciplines
“Consilience is the unification of knowledge, and the argument he makes is many of the vexing problems we have in our world will require combining different disciplines together to try to solve them.”
Michael Mauboussin Nov 4, 2022 ▶ 45:39 Michael Mauboussin: The Single Biggest Mistake Investors Make In Decision-Making | 20VC #945 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mauboussin: Expected Long-Term Equity Returns Have Increased Significantly in 2022
“When you look at even 20, 22, Expected returns for equities have gone up a lot. I don't know if the markets are going to be good the next month, three months, six months, but I think expected returns look pretty good.”
Michael Mauboussin Nov 4, 2022 ▶ 48:24 Michael Mauboussin: The Single Biggest Mistake Investors Make In Decision-Making | 20VC #945 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Mauboussin: Great managers rarely overcome bad business economics
“If a challenging business and brilliant management, it's likely the business's reputation remains intact. I think that was a good example, which is I really liked the CEO, but I the business itself was challenged and the reputation of the business remained int…”
Michael Mauboussin Nov 4, 2022 ▶ 49:28 Michael Mauboussin: The Single Biggest Mistake Investors Make In Decision-Making | 20VC #945 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Mauboussin: Premortems surface downside risks by forcing independent, forward-looking critique
“And the other one, I mean, the other technique is known as a premortem, which you're probably familiar with, which is we pretend we made the investment. It's now a year from now, or two years from now, and this investment's turned very sour. It's very bad. We'…”
Michael Mauboussin Nov 4, 2022 ▶ 18:15 Michael Mauboussin: The Single Biggest Mistake Investors Make In Decision-Making | 20VC #945 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Mauboussin: Corporate capital allocation has shifted predominantly to intangible assets
“We've had in the last few decades, a huge rise in intangible investment, right? So companies used to invest in factories and machines and inventory, old fashioned stuff. And the accounting for that was a certain way. Now companies are investing mostly in intan…”
Michael Mauboussin Nov 4, 2022 ▶ 20:20 Michael Mauboussin: The Single Biggest Mistake Investors Make In Decision-Making | 20VC #945 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Mauboussin: US 10-year real interest rates experienced a 240-basis-point swing
“When the United States, for example, we went from on the tenure negative a hundred basis points, real interest rates, -100 basis points today, about a 140 positive basis points. So it's a 240 basis point swing in real interest rates.”
Michael Mauboussin Nov 4, 2022 ▶ 42:35 Michael Mauboussin: The Single Biggest Mistake Investors Make In Decision-Making | 20VC #945 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mauboussin: Bill Gurley pioneered applying return on capital and increasing returns
“I think he's very early on understanding the importance of return on capital investment returns, cash flows, and he applied it right away. Very successfully, by the way, in investments. The second is he was very early on and understanding Brian Arthur's work o…”
Michael Mauboussin Nov 4, 2022 ▶ 46:24 Michael Mauboussin: The Single Biggest Mistake Investors Make In Decision-Making | 20VC #945 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

The other half of the tape: Michael Mauboussin's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 5 times in 5 episodes on 20VC. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Will Quist 1Michael Eisenberg 1Chris Farmer 1Annie Duke 1

Statements about Michael Mauboussin, by other people (1)

Opinion
Quist: Every venture capitalist should read Michael Mauboussin's The Success Equation
“Professionally, it's the success equation by Mike Mabusian. No, no, no, no full stop. Everyone in venture should read it. It's, it changed how I operate day to day.”
Will Quist Sep 12, 2022 ▶ 1:00:24 Will Quist: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really “Venture Capital” | 20VC #924 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0011222016201720182019202020212022episodesmentions
0122016201720182019202020212022episodes it came up in
000.51122016201720182019202020212022episodesmentions per episode
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2021 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2019 1 mention in 1 episode
2016 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Michael Mauboussin: The Single Biggest Mistake Investors Make In Decision-Making | 20VC #9 Nov 4, 2022 39m
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