Brinton Johns, co-founder of NZS Capital, discusses applying lessons from biological systems and Stanford complexity coursework to corporate analysis and equity investing.
“You know, it's really more about resilience than it is about predicting the future. And it's about adaptability. Like biology doesn't really care that much about the future. They care about adapting to this wide range of futures, right? Like my bees don't really care if it's going to snow tomorrow. They can adapt to snow. They've learned how to do that over millions of years. And what if we looked at companies like that?”
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More from Brinton Johns
Insight
Johns: Major technological shifts require vertical integration rather than horizontal efficiency
“When technology changes, like, I just didn't have a concept for the smartphone. So technology was about to change quite a bit. And in that change, you really want to be vertically integrated because you're not pushing efficiency. You're pushing sort of product…”
Brinton JohnsNov 3, 2021▶ 1:24:05Complexity Investing & Semiconductors with NZS Capital (Extended Cut) · Acquired
Insight
Johns: Leaving money on the table maximizes long-term total value
“When you leave money on the table, what you're doing is you're creating goodwill for your customers and you're buying the company duration, which is oftentimes the way to maximize total value, right?”
Brinton JohnsNov 3, 2021▶ 1:50:20Complexity Investing & Semiconductors with NZS Capital (Extended Cut) · Acquired
Insight
Johns: Emergent behavior makes exact future predictions useless
“We don't know how the future is going to unfold because the system is interacting together, and it creates what's called emergent behavior, and emergent behavior makes predicting useless in most cases, and we can have guidelines and heuristics, and those are a…”
Brinton JohnsNov 3, 2021▶ 9:09Complexity Investing & Semiconductors with NZS Capital (Extended Cut) · Acquired
What-if
Johns: Intel should have adopted ARM's IP licensing model for mobile chips
“They came down, they came out with a cheaper version of it, but in reality, that's not what they should have done. They should have, you know, actually embraced a totally different business model like arm dead. We're just, they were just selling IP and enablin…”
Brinton JohnsNov 3, 2021▶ 25:28Complexity Investing & Semiconductors with NZS Capital (Extended Cut) · Acquired
Insight
Johns: Investment 'conviction' is just a synonym for overconfidence and sunk-cost bias
“We use conviction as a synonym for overconfidence. I think that's what Really is the right way to, that's the right way to think about it. Conviction for us means, hey, I've done a ton of work, so I've got a lot of sunk costs, which means I've got bias, and I …”
Brinton JohnsNov 3, 2021▶ 41:53Complexity Investing & Semiconductors with NZS Capital (Extended Cut) · Acquired
Opinion
Johns: Zoom looks more like a feature than a platform
“With a company like Zoom, which we never owned because, you know, I don't know, this bad call. It looks a lot to us like a feature, and then, so now the question is, can it become a product and eventually maybe a platform?”
Brinton JohnsNov 3, 2021▶ 51:59Complexity Investing & Semiconductors with NZS Capital (Extended Cut) · Acquired
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