Eko Weekly Round-Up 7/18/25

🧠 Insights You Won’t Forget

Today's insights are compiled from the past week!

1. Google’s IPO changed tech financing forever

   They insisted on a Dutch auction to avoid insider games and used a dual-class structure to maintain founder control. Both moves were contrarian at the time and both are now Silicon Valley norms.

2. Search economics: revenue per user increases as you scale

   In most businesses, costs go down with scale. In search, revenue also goes up, more bidders per keyword and more obscure queries monetized. This meant Google could always outbid competitors for user acquisition.

3. AI will augment, not replace, alpha-seeking analysts

   While AI can pull up analogs and test hypotheses, the most valuable input comes from analysts who can tie market structure, narrative, and intuition into a compelling, actionable insight. AI can’t fully replace that blend, yet.

4. Portfolio crowding is a real risk, even in structurally segregated pods

   Despite internal firewalls, popular themes (e.g., AI, Brazilian real) can leak across pods via asset proxies or correlated ETFs, threatening true uncorrelated returns. Good risk managers monitor return patterns for hidden overlap.

5. You don’t need to scale to win

   Reject the default narrative of “bigger is better.” If you prefer to stay small, solo, or avoid management, that’s a valid and sustainable path. What matters is building your agency around your personal values and goals, not someone else’s blueprint.

6. Trust-based referrals are the ultimate growth flywheel

   The strongest client pipeline comes from personal referrals built on trust. Ask for testimonials, recommendations, and introductions at the end of each successful project to build a durable referral machine.

7. Investor-First Architecture: The TAO Model

   Sixth Street built TAO, a $30B+ balance sheet-like vehicle, to backstop and co-invest with smaller, strategy-matched funds. This allows them to write billion-dollar checks while keeping core fund sizes aligned with actual opportunity—not just fundraising ambition.

8. Thematic Investing with 12–36 Month Shelf Life

   At any time, Sixth Street runs 15–25 investment themes derived from real-time sector insights, executive conversations, and internal cross-platform pattern recognition. Key point: good themes have expiration dates, so agility is critical.

💡 Eko Worth Remembering

🛤️ Off the Record

Happy Monday! What a week, I spent half of it in NYC to see some friends and catch the live Acquired event and am now back home. What a feeling to sleep in your own bed, truly amazing.

Anyways.. Wanted to share my thoughts from the event:

The event started off with the Jamie Dimon, CEO of J.P Morgan, where the Acq guys took us through his life journey. The key insight from this talk for me was the idea of calculated risk and bet sizing. When Jamie went to run Bank One he bought $60 million worth of the stock to show that he was all in. Well maybe half in as he only put in half his net worth at the time into the stock. This risk ended up paying multitudes.

The next guest that was brought out was Meredith Kopit Levien, CEO of the New York Times, where the conversation dived into AI, journalism, and gaming. A fact that shocked me was the the NYT is approaching around 12 million subscribers. That is about 12 million more than I have! I am curious to know how many of those subs primarily just use it for the games (wordle, connections, etc.). Top insight from Meredith was that the NYT will continue to make hard copies of the paper and that those still account for 20-25% of their revenue.

The last guest that put the cherry on top was Barry Diller, a TV Hall of Famer, chairman of IAC and Expedia Group, Co-founder of Fox and USA, to just name a few. This guy has done it all at an extremely high level. I have never seen Barry speak before, and man, he has a unique personality. His parting piece of advice was something like “I don’t have advice”, but said in a funny manner. Besides that my main takeaway was simply just try things and know when it times to move on. Barry had a monumental rise early in his career at ABC where he had the unique opportunity to read thousands of records from the management team going back years. Did it take him 3 years to read it all, yes. But that type of information gave him a special edge when it came to learning about past failures and success.

I also want to give a shout to the production team behind the scene’s as they did a fabulous job making the event run smoothly.

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