Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Steer the boat every day
Who Singleton was
Singleton was a math genius who played on MIT's Putnam team. He compounded his earnings per share at over forty percent a year for twenty to twenty-five years, and Buffett called him the best capital allocator in America and the best operator.
Staying flexible
His mantra was to stay flexible. Everyone is subject to outside forces and nobody is smart enough to predict them, so he preferred to steer the boat a little bit every day.
Long Lake's version
Long Lake follows the same philosophy in choosing industries. When it started, its founder had never thought about travel. A thesis built over time and an open mind led to American Express Global Business Travel, a business with a reputation for gold-plated customer excellence and one of the best AI opportunities to improve service, at a pretty reasonable multiple. Without that flexibility about industries, Long Lake never would have looked at it.
Why did Teledyne buy back so many shares?
Teledyne used its richly valued stock to buy companies through the 1960s, then reversed course when its share price fell. William Thorndike's book The Outsiders describes the company retiring roughly 90 percent of its shares outstanding over about a dozen years. Singleton treated buying back stock as one more use of capital, to be chosen when it offered the best return.
Why do detailed plans fail in uncertain fields?
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, the Prussian chief of staff, wrote in 1871 that no plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first contact with the enemy's main force. The idea is that a plan fixes assumptions in advance, and a changing situation soon breaks them. Dwight Eisenhower put it another way in a 1957 speech: plans are worthless, but planning is everything.
More from David Senra
