Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - The Decision-Making Framework That Leads to Profitable Investments | Shane Neman - Strategic Investor

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Lessons - The Decision-Making Framework That Leads to Profitable Investments | Shane Neman - Strategic Investor · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lesson's episode, discover that successful investing is less about
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  capital size and more about discipline decision making.
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  Learn why removing emotions from investment decisions is essential.
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  Understand how surrounding yourself with expert mentors, sharpen your strategy,
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  and uncover how diversification opens doors to new opportunities even in volatile markets.
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  So I asked you if you consider yourself a professional investor, but at the very minimum, you are a professional decision maker.
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  That's what you, I think, but everybody is.
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  I think that just, I think that actually it's all relative, I was going to say, because there's more capital, there's more stakes,
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  but it doesn't really matter because at any level, it's all relative.
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  Really, he could be putting in like five grand into a company.
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  And if you lose it all, it's still five grand gone.
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  If you're only making 70 grand a year or whatever, that's that's significant to you.
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  So it doesn't really make a difference.
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  So being a good investor equates to being a good decision maker and also being able to remove your emotions
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  from the investment.
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  It's a very hard to do.
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  It's a very, I am not particularly good at it, but I'm seasoned and I'm hardened.
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  So you sold easy texting.
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  Yes, you started investing.
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  I started investing.
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  I made a lot of mistake.
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  Okay, so, but even like the thought process, because again, I do see you being more active
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  than a lot of the people that I know.
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  A lot of people I know who sold the company, they only invest in the thing that they know.
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  Yes, and all across the bar and or real estate.
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  That's like the only like you could be like a SaaS founder and you just do like early stage
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  prop tech, SaaS and then plus real estate or yeah, but you do everything.
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  I do because I and you have to talk about the stuff that you put money into.
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  Oh, yeah.
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  So I'll tell you my strategy is very different now than it was before, but I started.
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  Yeah, but I think that being able to control, if you if you look at the best investors,
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  like a buffet or those guys, right, they're all like all slightly on the spectrum.
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  And so they don't experience emotion the same way that an quote unquote normal people do, right?
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  Or you and I do or we know, so so they could see like a huge loss on their account
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  and not slinch because they're so certain about what they're they just did.
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  And they're just like, I'm willing to wait, wait, be wrong for a long time until I'm right.
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  Yeah, but for most people, if I thought hard attack, yeah, you go you go in and you see your account
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  down 30%, 40%, 50%, you're going to have a hard attack and you're going to make a bad decision.
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  Okay, and so that's an acquired skill.
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  And sometimes it's even when you acquire the skill, like even during COVID,
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  like I was on the verge of making some really bad decisions that I'm thankful that I didn't make,
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  but I was this close, you know, like I'm not immune to it, right?
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  To making emotional decisions.
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  And so, you know, that's a practice.
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  It's really it's it's just like working out, right?
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  Like the more you practice it or you know, yoga or whatever it is,
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  the more you practice it, the better you get at it.
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  And you know, you can start small.
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  I found, you know, a few few people who I respected,
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  I talked to them all the time.
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  It's very hard to find those people in whatever you're looking for.
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  But like for me, it was for investments, you know, for other people, it could be a health,
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  you know, you, you know, I know you and Gary are tight now, right?
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  And you know, you have his own, like I mean, he's built a massive social media business with
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  Valeria. So like he's one of the guys that I looked to for that.
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  But there's not many people that that are killing it.
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  Like could it 0.001% is for a reason, right?
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  Yeah. So, so it's worth your time and effort to try and find those people
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  that you want to surround yourself in.
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  That's probably the 90% of the game.
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  And the amount that I learned from those people.
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  And now I'm adding value to them because I learned their techniques.
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  I learned from them.
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  And now I'm like contributing, right?
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  And so I think that that's an essential.
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  You really want to find those people that are experts in what you're trying to do and
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  put yourself around them and put yourself into scenarios that give you high probability of
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  meeting those people in situations.
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  So, yeah. So now my investment thesis is very different than them before.
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  What was it when I don't even know you don't mean what?
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  I think I was trying to do a little bit of what you said.
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  I know I didn't really state and I did sass and things I knew initially.
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  But then, you know, when I put myself around other investors that were really smart,
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  they were opening up whole new worlds for me and showing me biotech and showing me
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  deep tech and showing me CPG.
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  Like we did in Athletic Greens, for example.
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  We were one of the investments that I did with one of my friends.
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  It's an amazing investor as well.
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  And then looking at late-stage businesses,
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  you know, like we did Pacific Park at the Santa Monica Pier,
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  which we bought that business, which is one of the,
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  it's a number one tourist destination in Los Angeles.
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  I know. So you've literally bought a Santa Monica Pier.
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  We didn't buy the Pier itself.
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  I can't. You can't own the Pier, right?
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  It sounds cool.
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  We bought the business of the Pier, so it's a little bit different.
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  But there's, you know, there's a real estate component to it.
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  But I think right now my tech, by the way, are those some of your biggest ones?
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  So Athletic Greens?
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  That's, yeah, so I think Athletic Greens.
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  Athletic Greens, the Pier is one of the biggest deals I've ever,
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  I've ever been involved with.
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  The, I did a company called Figure AI recently,
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  which is a humanoid robot that Brett Adcock founded.
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  I don't think I knew you when I first invested.
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  We've invested two years ago.
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  It was a unique time because the markets were doing really poorly at that time.
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  It was 2022, I think.
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  And, you know, tech was down a lot.
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  Inflation was raging and Brett comes out and he's like,
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  I want to build a humanoid robot.
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  And all he had was a few guys that he had hired from Boston Dynamics,
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  a sample of a hand of a robot and a bunch of, I don't know, like, computerized prototypes.
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  But he had a track record though.
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  He had a track record and he was putting in 20 million of his own money.
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  So that's, see, that's the thing when you make decisions,
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  you have to also kind of take into, because if you just look at it at the face of it,
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  you, most 99.9% of people would never even,
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  like, even consider it because it's like, he's going to build a robot,
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  a human robot that we're, yeah, whatever, right?
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  Like, the one you put your money where your mouth is.
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  Yeah, if as a founder.
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  And going into details matter, right?
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  So like, those things matter, you know, he had a track record.
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  He's had two exits.
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  He took archery aviation public.
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  So he had a lot of hardware experience and scaling hardware.
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  He was putting his money where his mouth was,
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  he had gone pretty far even with very little
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  money of actually making a functional hand, which is the hardest part of a robot mostly.
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  Um, and so when I first did that investment, most people thought I was batch at crazy
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  because, you know, first of all, the markets were in turmoil at that time.
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  So it's very hard under fear to make investments.
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  But that's where the removing your emotion piece.
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  Absolutely.
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  Absolutely.
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  Like, whether it's in the public markets or the private markets, it's irrelevant, right?
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  People get disgusted and they don't want to look, right?
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  They don't want to look because they, they see their account down, right?
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  And they're like, oh, yeah, now I'm going to make an investment and like take even more
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  money out of there.
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  But the thing is those two, those two things are completely separate from each other.
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  It is logically speaking.
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  But it's very hard to separate it out.
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  And so anyway, um, as luck would have it, which I think 90% of all this is luck, obviously.
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  Uh,
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  Brett was successful.
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  He made a prototype that actually works.
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  It's actually deployed in Amazon and BMW right now.
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  It's probably the him, him and Optimus from Tesla are probably the incumbents in the
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  field, um, where they have a real viable product that can actually
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  replace human labor.
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  And if you think about a human labor, physical labor is a three trillion dollar
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  tam, like at everything, like it's all the work that no one really wants to do, right?
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  Like this is, you know, no one wants to go and pick and pack in a warehouse and go down
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  aisles and pull things from boxes and, you know, take a piece of sheet metal and keep putting
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  into a press a thousand times a day, um, which is where he's starting, which I think is the
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  right thing and also in the warehouse, uh, you know, a robot's in a controlled environment.
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  So the safety issues are kind of much more manageable, mitigated a little.
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  Yeah, they're much more manageable.
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  It's also talking to a computer that's giving it directions like a warehouse management system
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  versus, you know, me, you know, robot being in my house and I'm saying wash dishes, right?
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  It's a little bit different.
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  It's almost like, um, well, robots exist in car manufacturing already.
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  They do, but this is certain parts, certain parts of it.
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  So this is just like almost finishing or, or, or more parts of the, the factory is now been.
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  So Tesla, I think, you know, their idea is that the entire process will be done by a robot.
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  And, and as a practical matter, all the other robots that work on, on anything are,
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  you know, the environment is retrofitted for the robot so that the robot can work
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  correctly in that environment, but the world is meant to interface with humans.
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  It's meant to interface with hands, feet, you know, at, you know, stable.
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  It like a human it, like even an iPhone, if you go and actually look at how it's made,
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  a lot of it's done by hand.
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  You can't even imagine, right?
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  It's done on a huge scale in China, but a lot of the pieces are being done by hand.
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  And so, if you can really, truly replace that, the, the, the, the opportunity is huge.
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  It's almost like bigger as big as cars were when cars were invented, right?
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  The opportunity is, is huge in the entire physical labor.
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  So it's funny when, whenever an investor or an entrepreneur is like,
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  Tam, like total addressable market, and they say some ridiculous, outlandish number.
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  And you're like, well, if I just captured like 1% of Tam or whatever,
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  then I can't really hold these successful.
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  But this is, this is, this is really truly a giant Tam.
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  I mean, like the payroll that's, I mean, first of all, Amazon and all these places,
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  they can't even get enough workers.
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  There is not enough workers to, they want to do this.
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  So they have to constantly raise the price of, of what they're willing to pay.
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  I mean, the port workers, you just saw what happened.
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  It was just how the strike, it is huge.
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  Yeah, no, it got resolved.
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  But they're getting paid like $65 an hour now.
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  That's, that's, that's significant.
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  That's, that's huge.
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  Yeah. So like, why wouldn't you replace that person with a robot if you could?
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  It makes no sense.
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  What do you need a person to like move cargo from one side of the port to the other?
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  And like, there's a lot of issues with that because they're safety issues.
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  Like if, if, if, if, if, you know, if a piece of cargo falls on a, on a robot, no one cares.
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  But if they've got injuries of person, that's millions of dollars.
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  And yeah, the productivity gains the, the things that come with it.
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  And so anyway, just recently, they raised 650 million from like,
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  Microsoft and open AI and Jeff Bezos put a hundred million dollars in.
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  So, you know, I look smart.
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  And now and now and now and then let's see what happens in two years.
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  Yeah, all right. Like it could be a zero, right?
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  Thanks for tuning in.
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  And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation,
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  check out the links in the description to watch the full episode.
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  See you in the next one.