Michael Mauboussin
Head of Consilient Research, Counterpoint Global. On 4 shows, 9 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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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.
4shows
9appearances
222statements
69resolved
64supported
1contradicted
93%fully supported
79said about them ↓ Everything Michael Mauboussin said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Mauboussin: Public equity returns exhibit the same power law as venture capital
“We associate power laws with venture, but if you let it play out in public markets, it's also the exact same power law. It's a power of compounding is the key insight.”
Mauboussin: Mega-Cap Economics Have Defied Classical Theory Since 2000
“Since 2000, roughly speaking, it feels like the economics of the biggest companies have been almost economic law defying by that. I mean, two things. One is they've grown faster than what we would expect big companies to do. And they've sustained very high ret…”
Mauboussin: Magnificent Seven Economic Profit Exceeds Market Cap Share
“When you take a look at the economic profit, so return on capital, less cost capital spread times invested capital, the economic profit Of the Magnificent Seven, it's actually larger than their market cap representation.”
Mauboussin: Companies Ignore Cost of Capital and Rely on a 15% Hurdle Rate
“So it turns out it's really interesting that companies, they calculate their cost of capital. They know it, but they don't use it. For almost everything they do, they use a hurdle rate, and that hurdle rate's roughly 15%. So whether the cost of capital goes to…”
Mauboussin: Strong investment track records often stem purely from systemic randomness
“When you think about investing, there may be a lot of randomness in the system, and some people are going to be in the position to be lucky, and hence, they'll, their track record, for example, may look good as just beneficiaries of a random system.”
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.”
Mauboussin: Buyout fund performance persistence has melted away over 20 years
“That persistence used to have to happen in buyouts. But that effect is mostly melted away in the last 20 years, and it's very difficult to find persistence in public markets at all.”
Mauboussin: High seed startup valuations can have positive expected value
“Sometimes it's going to seem insane to pay a lot, thirty million dollars for two people in a garage. When that still may have positive expected value, if that becomes one of the few things that really drive the value.”
Mauboussin: High-Return Companies Should Maximize Investment Over Positive Free Cash Flow
“Some people think, oh, you want positive free cashflow. Well, the answer is not really. I mean, what you want is you, if you can invest at a high return, you want to invest as much as you humanly possibly can, right? That you have access to.”
Mauboussin: As Average Skill Increases, Luck Ultimately Dictates Outcomes
“The paradox of Gil says, and activities were both skill and luck contribute to outcomes, which is most stuff as skill increases, luck becomes more important.”
Mauboussin: Portfolio managers underperform by ignoring their own position sizing rules
“Even there's some evidence if you ask portfolio managers to write down Ex ante, what rules they should follow to size their positions. A, they don't follow those rules, and B, there's evidence that they did follow their own rules, they would do better than the…”
Mauboussin: Funds Run by Three Portfolio Managers Generate the Most Alpha
“What it was found was that the funds that delivered the most Alpha were actually funds with three portfolio managers and better than single managers, and by the way, better than two and four.”
Mauboussin: NBA outcomes rely on skill; hockey and baseball involve luck
“The NBA is the sport that's furthest from randomness, furthest from pure luck configuration, and sports like actually ice hockey and baseball are actually quite much closer to being random.”
Mauboussin: Senior executive decisions depend far more on luck than entry-level work
“Usually when you're a lower level worker, your job actually tends to have a higher skill component, right? So you're doing something, you're on an accounts receivable clerk and you're collecting accounts receivables, right? We can measure what we're doing. It'…”
Mauboussin: Network effects create increasing returns that defy economic mean reversion
“So we're taught in economics, microeconomics, and by the way, it's still largely true that, Returns on incremental capital tend to migrate toward the cost of capital, and typically the reason for that is competition, right? If you're generating, Shane, massive…”
Mauboussin: As Overall Skill Improves In Any Field, Luck Drives Outcomes
“And the paradox of skills when both luck and skill are contributing to outcomes, which is most things, right? There are some things that are mostly skill like running races, but most things in life have at least a dollop of luck. It can be the case that a skil…”
Mauboussin: US Active Equity's $1 Trillion Gross Profit Was Erased By Fees
“The cumulative gross profit, I think we have 35 years of numbers, is about a trillion, trillion net positive gross profit. So gross profit positive more than, you know, ok, is a trillion dollars. Now, that also happens to be about what the fees were in that ti…”
Mauboussin: Active Managers Perform Best In Markets With Highest Explicit Indexing
“They found that in markets where the Explicit indexing was highest Active managers often did the best”
Mauboussin: Buying Fired Fund Managers Consistently Outperforms Buying Newly Hired Ones
“Study after study demonstrates that if you bought the funds that were fired and sold the ones that were hired, you actually, just because of regression toward the mean, you do much better.”
Mauboussin: Individual Cognitive Biases Often Cancel Out, Leaving Markets Efficient
“The fact that you and I are suboptimal and it's easy for us to show that we're suboptimal as individuals that doesn't necessarily translate into a market setting, right? Because our errors may cancel out. You're overconfident. You buy, I'm overconfident. I sel…”
Mauboussin: Liquidity, Not Leverage, Will Be The Next Major Market Systemic Challenge
“I don't suspect leverage is going to be the next big challenge, I do think liquidity might be the case.”
Mauboussin: Simple Algorithms Beat Expert Forecasters in Complex Markets
“And so what we know, and this has been extraordinarily well documented by folks like Phil Tetlock, psychologist, University of Pennsylvania, and others is that in quotation marks, expert forecasts, they tend not to be very good at it. In fact, typically simple…”
Mauboussin: Top 2% of public companies generated 90% of US wealth creation
“What's remarkable is if you distill that even one step further, the top two percent of that 28,000 created 50 trillion dollars. Of the 55 trillion in total. So just two percent of all these companies are essentially 90% of the total wealth creation.”
The other half of the tape: Michael Mauboussin's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 76 times in 43 episodes across the shows. 3 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ted Seides 14Ben Gilbert 9Annie Duke 8David Rosenthal 7Patrick O'Shaughnessy 4Mason Morfit 4Bill Gurley 4Paul Enright 3
Statements about Michael Mauboussin, by other people (3)
Gilbert: Venture Capitalists Historically Lack Financial Investing Fundamentals
“For the longest time, venture capital investors have not had a financial investing fundamentals background. They often come from being entrepreneurs and, you know, not, not necessarily the original VCs, but a recent trend. And so you have people that don't hav…”
Enright: David Ott Was Viking Global's Secret Weapon
“David is, I think, the secret weapon inside Viking, right? David is, if you took all of the aspects of Michael Mobison that everybody thinks is amazing, and then all the aspects of Steve Mandel, and you put them together, that's David Ott.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Capital Allocators 47
Acquired 16
the Knowledge Project 8
20VC 5
2026 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2025 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2024 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2022 24 mentions in 10 episodes 2 per episode
- Annie Duke – The Power of Quitting (Capital Allocators, EP.273)
- Amazon.com · Acquired
- Paul Enright – Inside Long-Short Equity Investing (Capital Allocators, EP.266)
- The Playbook: Lessons from 200+ Company Stories · Acquired
- Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert – Acquiring an Industry. Venture is Eating the Investment World 1 (Capital Allocators, EP.229)
- Will Quist: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really “Venture Capital” | 20VC #924 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Howard Marks & Andrew Marks: Something of Value · Acquired
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2022 →
2021 9 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- Complexity Investing & Semiconductors with NZS Capital (Extended Cut) · Acquired
- Ted with Jenny Heller – Compounding Knowledge and Relationships (Capital Allocators, EP.185)
- Ted with Patrick O'Shaughnessy – Lessons from the World's Elite Money Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.184)
- 20VC: Aleph's Michael Eisenberg on Why Generalists Over Specialists, Why Boutique Smaller Firms Over Multi-Stage Firms, Portfolio Construction Theory, Capital Concentration Limits and How To Think Through Reserve Allocations with Market Cycles in Mind?
- 20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2019 8 mentions in 6 episodes 1 per episode
- Jason Karp – From Hedge Funds to Health and Wellness at HumanCo (First Meeting, EP.12)
- Patrick O'Shaughnessy – O'Shaughnessy Asset Management (First Meeting, EP.01)
- 20VC: Benchmark's Bill Gurley on 5 Traits Benchmark Look For When Adding To The Partnership, Why The Abundance of Capital Is Today's Biggest Challenge in VC & The Right Way To Think About Market Size When Assessing Opportunities
- David Zorub - The Path to a Hedge Fund Launch (Capital Allocators, EP.96)
- #50 Josh Wolfe: Inventing the Future
- #49 Brent Gilchrist: Goal Mining
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 11 mentions in 7 episodes 2 per episode
- Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43)
- Mark Baumgartner – Luck, Risk and Uncertainty at the Institute for Advanced Study (Capital Allocators, EP.77)
- Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64)
- Brian Portnoy – From Complex to Simple (Capital Allocators, EP.57)
- Basil Qunibi - Moneyball for Allocators (Capital Allocators, EP.42)
- Annie Duke - Improving Decision Making [Capital Allocators, EP.39]
- Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38)
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
2017 6 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- Jeffrey Solomon – Vision, Tenacity, and Empathy (Capital Allocators, EP.09)
- Deep Dive into Hedge Funds (Capital Allocators, EP.34)
- Paul Johnson and Paul Sonkin – The Perfect Investment (Capital Allocators, EP.32)
- Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14)
- The Bet with Buffett (Capital Allocators, EP.05)
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 1 mention in 1 episode
2015 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Michael's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Head of Consilient Research, Counterpoint Global | 5 | 120 | 88% 37/42 | full record on Capital Allocators → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Head of Consilient Research, Counterpoint Global | 1 | 35 | 100% 11/11 | full record on 20VC → |
| KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Head of Consilient Research, Counterpoint Global | 2 | 35 | 100% 6/6 | full record on the Knowledge Project → |
| ACQUIREDLEDGER | Head of Consilient Research, Counterpoint Global | 1 | 32 | 100% 10/10 | full record on Acquired → |