Ethos Capital

“What I had come to realize that I needed to do with Fadi was create something completely new. Not something that could be retrofit in any way, shape, or form. It was a recognition that Avery was a three Michelin star French restaurant serving 300 people a nigh…”

“That seat is not a seat for every kind of operator to sit in because you have to be open. You have to be non-threatening. You have to be collaborative. You have to give off all of those personal qualities in order for the person that you're talking to give you…”

“We've made equity investments of a hundred million dollars. We've made equity investments of five hundred million dollars.”

“All of these are the things that we're working on that we don't build into our base cases. If any of them work, And we had our base case, then there's alpha in a system of hopefully asymmetric risk that we've created in the original base case.”

“In 20, 24, we didn't do a deal.”

“If we only come up with four or five ideas, then it's not an ethos company. There's no alpha in our participating in throwing our resources into the business. It's got to have a lot of ideas.”

“One of the things that we've done is leaned in and enhanced the management teams of the businesses that we've owned to give them the resources to do some of these things, because it's unrealistic to assume that someone's going to do their day job and all of th…”

“We have built from scratch our own AI-powered operating system. We have these 16 partners in different locations that need to look at information asynchronously. Everything that we do at Ethos feeds into our data lake and is run through our knowledge graph in …”

“A SOFR plus six, 25 unit tranche deal that we're paying 10 and a half on into a securitized asset backed loan that we're going to pay a fixed 6.8% and save fifty million dollars a year. That's a complicated thing where you have to completely redesign the legal…”

“Every partner at Ethos is somebody that Fadi or I have known for at least a decade.”

“We've made it very clear, and our partners are great at executing this, which is the relationship that the ethos partner has with their counterpart at the company is Is a sacrosanct cone of silence, trust relationship, where the only information that's coming …”

“Exiting for us is driven by what do we think the incremental rate of return is on owning the business for another year? If it's below our base case, then we should probably sell it.”

“We're only looking to do about a deal a year. We are very concentrated.”

“What we've done at Ethos is we've recognized that not everybody has to ultimately be great at everything and each deep and a mile wide. What we've done is created an organization of people that in some ways are an inch wide and a mile deep. Recognizing that no…”

“We probably dig deep on No more than six or seven companies a year.”

“The business has EBITDA margins in the sixties, is growing top line double digit, has 98% free cash flow conversion, very much like Verisign, for example, almost a mirror image.”

“If you own something, then you are choosing to buy it at the price that you are carrying it. You should be thinking about everything that you own through that lens.”

“For every deal that we do, we have two moments in time on the front end and the back end where we have these round tables where every one of the partners is involved in helping us on the front end develop, we call them acceleration vectors, ideas for us to hav…”

“We have one deal team, which is a bit unusual in an organization that has almost six billion dollars of capital under management.”

“We put so much work into these companies that I would tell you that the real evidence of financial performance doesn't really show up for probably two or three years.”

“Within that operating support system, we are building out principal, vice president, associate. They're just different skill sets than somebody who's grown up in the world of financial modeling and deal diligence.”