Oct 11, 2017
Quotes from the podcast:
“Every startup investment is folly, but not every folly should be a startup investment…”
"How can I eliminate the real follies?"
“Banks are dominated by all these rules, and they're extremely risk averse. It's sort of like belt and suspenders, and yet, periodically, their pants fall down.”
“Someone who's selling is steeling herself for failure in every phone call…”
Sal Daher got a person who knows him really well, his brother in law Martin Aboitiz, to interview him in this 25th episode of the Angel Invest Boston podcast. The result is a wide-ranging and light-hearted conversation that tells a lot about how Sal sees the world of startups.
BTW, during the podcast Sal refers to the physicist Stephen Hawking as Christopher Hawking. This lapse was occasioned by Sal having spent time with Christopher Lydon (Christopher Lydon's Website) just days prior to recording. Sal's sure neither gentleman takes umbrage from the confusion.
The list of topics includes:
- Sal Daher Bio
- Switch from Engineering to International Finance
- How Sal Started Investing
- How Being a Banker and an Engineer Helped Develop Sal’s Investing Philosophy
- ”When I look at markets, I understand that markets are not knowable, and so I don't look to guess where markets are going. I don't look to think that I know more than anybody else, or that I know more than the market.”
- “Banks are dominated by all these rules, and they're extremely risk averse. It's sort of like belt and suspenders, and yet, periodically, their pants fall down.”
- “I've developed kind of an approach of skepticism, you know Popperian skepticism of how much I can know.”
- Sal Has Andrew Carnegie as a Model – Keep a Lot of Cash to be Able to Buy Bargains
- “I can tell you right now, anything we're buying, we're buying it very expensively.”
- Sal Thanks Listener GranTia for Leaving a Review
- How Sal Decides on Which Startup to Invest
- “Every startup investment is folly, but not every folly should be a startup investment…”
- "How can I eliminate the real follies?"
- “What I have to do is I have to play a defensive game, I have to avoid investing in losers.”
- “Martin, I discovered a really amazing thing, being really smart and really knowledgeable has zero correlation with the ability to sell, zero, okay?”
- “Someone who's selling is steeling herself for failure in every phone call…”
- Regrets?
- Anti-portfolio
- Sal’s Favorite Pivots – Pixability & SQZ Biotech – Personal Pivots
- “I'm a big fan of pivots, because a pivot is an expression of belief in the ability of human beings to fall down and get up again.”
- Networking in Boston vs. the Bay Area
- “There's no other place like it [Boston], and there's an unbelievable variety of things that go on. It is a little bit insular, it is hard to network here, but I can tell you that the angel investing environment, there's no angel investing environment that's as collaborative as the one here.”
- “Now, venture capitalists aren't interested in follies, they're interested in sure bets.”
- “How many companies can an angel investor successfully track and manage in his portfolio?”
- People from Whom Sal Learns the Most