The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 17 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Kuruvilla: Philip Morris rates higher in ESG databases than lung cancer drugmakers
“So we have often marveled that Philip Morris, which is a widely known provisioner of cigarettes and tobacco, rates more highly on many of these databases than on companies that are actually trying to treat lung cancer.”
Kuruvilla: Multi-stakeholder value-creating businesses outperform purely financial-focused companies long-term
“The thesis is that those types of businesses that are creating value for its stakeholders will outperform over the long haul in general, those businesses that are focusing only on one form of capital, i.e. Financial capital.”
Kuruvilla: Studies suggest values-driven investing yields 3% annualized alpha
“I think the best studies out there would suggest that there's somewhere in the neighborhood of three percent annualized alpha that the market hasn't captured while controlling for size and market cap and all the standard factors there that is to be harvested.”
Kuruvilla: Deep domain expertise provides the real edge against Wall Street
“The basic line that Peter Lynch hammers home is that there's a few disciplines you need to learn in terms of accounting and some basic knowledge about investing, but the real edge that you can have to beat Wall Street is if you have deep domain expertise in a …”
Kuruvilla: Much of biotech makes minor drug tweaks to charge $300k
“Okay, so a lot of biotech, unfortunately, is based on taking something that's already out there and tweaking it very, very slightly, changing a few atoms here and there in order to get a patent worth 20 years of life, and then going to market there with an inc…”
Kuruvilla: A 10% edge in biotech trial forecasting creates outsized alpha
“It's the same thing in our field here, where if you can be even 10% better than the average, then you're going to be an all star because these events tend to be so Dramatic. So companies can go up two or three fold, a hundred percent, 200% moves overnight, or …”
Kuruvilla: Public equity investing confers ethical responsibility for corporate actions
“Investing is ownership. Investing confers an ethical responsibility To the owner for the activities of the firm.”
Kuruvilla: Recruiting on pay over mission creates mercenaries who jump firms
“One of the things that I think is so important is that you want to hire people for mission fit and for mission alignment much more so than recruit people on financial generosity or something like that. You can do that, but in the end, what you're going to have…”
Kuruvilla: Biotech innovators can impact 10x-100x more patients than individual clinicians
“If you want to really be able to maximize your ability to affect patients, Then moving over to something on the, say the biotech or pharmaceutical side, you're actually more likely to have a shot to actually impact an order of magnitude or two more than you wo…”
Kuruvilla: Eventide avoids me-too drugs and vanity aesthetics like Botox variants
“We tend to be less interested in these Me Too's, these slight tweaks here and there. We're also less interested in products that are gonna be just pandering to aspects of human vanity. There's this whole aspect of aesthetics, which it's just somebody selling a…”
Kuruvilla: Phase 3 clinical trials have roughly a 50% success rate
“It's roughly a flip of the coin at a phase three study.”
Kuruvilla: Executive charm and eloquence do not correlate with business competence
“And that feeling is a complicated result of charm, beauty, eloquence, all these factors that don't really, in the end, correlate very well to are they a great business person or not.”
Kuruvilla: Under 1% of religious investors' assets use values frameworks
“So right now, if you look at the percentage of assets that people have who are religious or values-inclined, frameworks like that, it's certainly less than one percent.”
Kuruvilla: True diligence requires in-person meals with founders and their associates
“If you really want to diligence somebody well, learn how to go out to lunch and dinner with not just that person, but the associates of those people to really understand who they are. It's amazing what you can learn over a meal that you wouldn't learn over Zoo…”
Kuruvilla: Childhood leukemia survival rates rose from ~10% in 1970 to ~90% today
“If you had a child in 1970 with leukemia, he or she would have about a 10% chance of making to adulthood. So pretty grim odds. Today, if you have a child with leukemia, He or she will have closer to a 90% chance of making to adulthood, so a complete reversal i…”
Kuruvilla: Eventide evaluates six internal and external stakeholders using CES-squared framework
“We have made the case that each business has fundamentally six neighbors or six stakeholders, and it's easy to remember. We have this acronym CES squared. There's three internal and three external stakeholders. So the three internal are customers, employees, a…”
Kuruvilla: Eventide launched in July 2008 on $800K friends-and-family capital
“Went around to, as I said, friends and family and raised about 800,000 dollars of just business capital to get the company going. And we launched Eventide in the summer of 2008. Our mutual fund opened up in July of 2008.”