Top clips from How I Invest with David Weisburd — featuring insights from leading CIOs, LPs, GPs, and institutional investors. Short. Sharp. Actionable.
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Peter Thiel's famous interview question: what do you believe that almost nobody else believes? Or what do you believe is false that everyone else accepts as true?
Michael Green (@profplum99) on why that question matters: it's designed to isolate the deviation from consensus that makes breakout returns possible.
But the harder discipline is what comes after. Thiel never let you straw man the other side. You steel man it. You build the strongest version of the counterargument, even one your opponent couldn't construct themselves, then see if your thesis survives it.
Adopt the null hypothesis. Try to disprove your own conjecture before the market does it for you.
Ryan Serhant on firing his own president:
"Culture is defined by the behaviors you allow. If you allow bad behavior, even if that person's work product is really, really great, you have set the tone that bad behavior is worth it if the work is there. And it becomes incredibly unhealthy."
Talent doesn't set the culture. Tolerance does.
Ryan Serhant didn't have the Upper East Side private school network. He didn't have a family handing him his first listing at Shabbat dinner.
He had YouTube. He had Instagram.
"I just really, really, really created this media enterprise to create deal flow."
Now studios sit at the top of his company's funnel. Content creates leads, leads create deals, deals fund more content. Round and round.
He didn't replace the network. He built a bigger one.
Once a company has its full executive team, Patrick Ewers argues the CEO's job collapses down to one thing: relationships.
No more IC work. Just find great people, convince them to join, then convince them to stay by making them successful.
"Make sure people feel good about interacting with you." That's the entire framework.
No frameworks. Just daily tactics.
Lucas Swisher breaks AI adoption into three overlapping S-curves.
Consumer ChatGPT usage, roughly halfway through its penetration curve.
Developer coding tools, still early, with no clear ceiling since usage and spend per developer keep climbing together.
Then the big one: legal, HR, finance, pharma, and everything else in the enterprise that's barely been touched.
"What happens in legal? What happens in HR? What happens in finance? We're just starting to actually be able to integrate this technology and address the broader pool of spend."
Coding proved the model works. The rest of the economy hasn't even started writing its curve yet.
Grant Cardone's proposal: zero tax on billionaires. Not for his own sake, he says. For what they drag in behind them.
"There's only 3,000 of us on the planet."
His logic: a multibillionaire moving to Miami isn't just a wealthy guy relocating. It's an entire country's GDP footprint landing in one marketplace, staff, yachts, spending, all flowing back into the local economy.
Jeff Bezos moved. Ken Griffin moved $58B. Both Google founders moved.
Cardone's read: tax policy didn't just redistribute wealth. It redistributed geography.
Ryan Serhant crossed 1,000 agents this year. That's not a headcount number, it's a thousand LLCs, a thousand businesses his back end suddenly had to support.
"The way we set up the business was for a startup company. As you scale, everything breaks."
Payment systems, state by state compliance, the whole stack. Built for one stage, tested by the next.
His phrase for the year: "Got you here, won't get you there."
Counterintuitive data point from Lucas Swisher, Co-Head of Growth Investing at Coatue: you're more likely to land a 10x above $10B in market cap than below it. Above $100B, the odds get even better.
Scale compounds. Better magnet for talent, more access to capital, network effects that entrench the business model.
He points to OpenAI, Anthropic, and now SpaceX pulling away from the rest of their markets, not because they started bigger, but because the advantage kept feeding itself.
Lucas Swisher on the real constraint every business owner underestimates:
"Folks are constrained by the amount of people that they can hire at the end of the day. We all want to do more, we all want to build more, and a lot of that is constrained by talented people who can do what we need on a day to day basis."
AI doesn't replace that talent. It removes the ceiling.
"There certainly will be displacement along the way. There are always things that get shaken up at the beginning of every technology wave. But at the end of the day, we're always better off than we were before."
Every wave looks like the end of jobs right up until it's the start of more of them.
Michael Green on why leveraged ETFs don't just amplify moves, they manufacture them.
Take SOXL, a 3x levered semiconductor ETF. $100 in, $300 of exposure. Index rises 10%, the unlevered position goes to $110, but the levered position goes to $330, meaning equity is now $130.
To hold the 3:1 ratio, the fund has to buy another $60. That buying isn't a reaction to new information. It's forced flow created by the leverage itself.
Green's term for it: endogenous leverage. Self-created flows that push prices higher on the way up and accelerate selling on the way down.
The mechanism doesn't care about fundamentals. It just needs the ratio to hold.
Ryan Serhant doesn't talk about markets. Doesn't need to.
He'd been waiting years for a real reset since COVID almost killed his company launch. When Trump's tariff poster tanked the market, he didn't flinch. He went all in.
"Bear market on Friday, bull market by Tuesday."
Every crash feels like the end. It never is.
Alex Edelson, on why portfolio construction is getting more scrutiny from LPs:
"It is increasingly difficult to invest in funds that have fewer than 20 companies."
Concentration used to be the flex. High ownership, fewer bets, high conviction. Now the bar for that strategy is higher than it's been historically.
Deep tech is the exception. The outcomes are big enough that Edelson is comfortable trading a bit of ownership for more shots on goal:
"25 to 35 is a great place to be for us."
Same discipline on ownership relative to fund size. Just more lottery tickets when the upside justifies it.
Patrick Ewers on the recruiting move most founders never make:
Every time you meet someone you'd want to hire one day, tell your EA to add them to a talent pool CRM. Not a resume. A bucket of 30-50 people for every seat you'll eventually need to fill.
Then stay in their orbit. A message every six weeks. Notice what's going on in their world, ask about it. Nothing transactional.
When the role finally opens, you're not cold-calling a stranger through a recruiter. You're pinging someone you've been genuinely close to for a year.
Ewers' point: the "resource effective founder" VCs chase isn't smarter or luckier. They just manage relationships instead of writing $120k checks to headhunters.
Everyone says they'd buy an 80% crash. Michael Green on why almost nobody actually does it:
"When you're actually living through that period, your financing is being withdrawn, your investors are redeeming, you've completely lost your confidence in yourself, everything becomes harder to execute that buy."
The chart makes the bottom look obvious in hindsight. Living through it, there's no cash left to buy anything with.
Down 80% to down 90% isn't a smaller move. It's another 50% gone from where you already are.
Ryan Serhant on why fully produced content is losing to live:
"Even forty minutes is a long time for people now."
His read: audiences are moving toward streamed over produced because produced feels manufactured. Live is harder, riskier, and that's exactly why it reads as honest.
The next shift is entire storylines resolved in under five minutes. Not because it's better storytelling. Because attention spans won't sit for anything longer.
"I don't know if it's good, but it's definitely gonna happen more and more."
Two LPs can run the exact same framework and end up with zero overlapping funds in their portfolios.
Alex Edelson on why: the framework was never the edge. It's the application.
Same references, same founders, same VCs on the calls, and the feedback still comes back different. One LP hears all positive. Another hears something more real. That gap is the whole game.
His time at QED shaped what he's comfortable with. He watched a firm win at a high level for years while looking messy behind the scenes. Unpolished pitch, imperfect portfolio construction, things that read as yellow flags to other LPs.
None of that scares him off anymore. It's often just what winning looks like before it's obvious.
Alex Edelson, on what actually builds investment judgment:
"It's not an IQ thing. It's not even an EQ thing. It's a rep thing."
Two people with identical IQ and EQ. One has seen 15 funds. One has seen 300. The second person just makes better decisions, every time.
But reps alone aren't enough. The venture ecosystem keeps changing, who's positioned to win keeps changing, and what worked ten years ago might not work now.
Pattern recognition without updating the patterns is just nostalgia.