Tell People You’re Different
I am doing you a solid here by letting you know that if you ever get the invitation to travel with our COO Mark, you should politely decline. The reason is he’s cursed. His flights are always delayed, impacted by weather, landing at the wrong airport, etc.
The silver lining of this is that it gives him a lot of time to unleash lengthy threads on Twitter (or whatever that Musk guy is calling his platform now). So it went the other day when he had another long layover and invited people to ask him anything because I guess he was bored.
One interesting question he received was from Ben Tiggelaar who wanted to know “What’s the Permanent [Equity] strategy around all this focus on social? So interesting given no [private equity] firms really focus on content.”
It was a good question and an astute observation, but the answer is a simple one: Because it makes sense.
As Mark replied, we know it adds value because both he and I first encountered Permanent Equity on Twitter and also because our funds originated as a result of a relationship Brent first built on the platform.
And as I added, we know that online content scales conversations and find that it’s an advantage for people to know us and what we’re going to say before they actually know us or we say anything. That’s because our value proposition and approach to investing are consistent, and we try to always do what we say we are going to do. At the risk of making a straw man argument, I suspect other private equity firms don’t publish content about what they do because either (1) they don’t want people to know or (2) they want the latitude to say whatever it takes to get a deal done.
Something that’s interesting is that if you have a problem, there are usually lots of solutions that will work once, but it’s harder to find a solution that will work sustainably. With regards to making investments, attracting investors, and recruiting, by laying a long trail of content that describes what we do and how we do it, we believe that things in those categories that would be a good fit for us will eventually find us. And also that that approach is superior to doing what it takes to capitalize on available opportunities. That means going long stretches without doing anything sometimes, but also never doing anything we don’t know or want to do.
So in short, be different and genuine because you can always be that, and if you are, tell people about it. But also, never travel with Mark.
– By Tim Hanson
