Will Thorndike - Lessons from the Eternal Outsider - [Joys of Compounding, EP.28]

About this episode

Will Thorndike discusses long-term value creation and the search fund model in this episode.

Our teacher today is Will Thorndike, co-founder of Compounding Labs and author of the acclaimed book, “The Outsiders.” In our opinion, Will has emerged as one of the most influential and innovative investor minds of the past few decades. And if you care about long-term value creation and the art of capital allocation, chances are you've also benefited from some of his ideas. In 1994, he founded Housatonic Partners, a pioneering private equity firm known for its unusually long holding periods and its leadership in the search fund space alongside his mentor and Stanford professor Irv Grousbeck. Will helped to originate the modern search fund model, backing early career CEOs to buy and grow businesses with long-term horizons and radically aligned incentives. Since then, he has invested in the majority of the top 20 search fund outcomes to date, including Asurion, which he recently profiled on his podcast 50X. We explore Will's full arc from the research that led to “The Outsiders” to his decades as an investor to the new frontier he's now helping to shape. We talk about what makes a business truly enduring, why great leadership and resource allocation remain so misunderstood, and…

People in this episode

Guest: Will Thorndike

Topics covered

• long-term value creation
• capital allocation
• search fund model
• business leadership
• resource allocation
• enduring businesses

Keywords

• investing
• capital allocation
• search funds
• business growth
• leadership
• value creation

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Compounding Labs, Housatonic Partners, Asurion, Pine Grove Studios

Books & works: The Outsiders

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