Transcript for Interview with Colin Moran

An interview on faith, investing, and the humanities with Colin Moran of Abdiel Capital

0. Introduction

Johnathan Bi: Colin Moran is unlike any successful hedge fund manager that I've ever met. He prefers the company of artists and writers to fellow investors. He has the disposition of a Catholic contemplative rather than aggressive financier. His fund isn't dominated by quants or Ivy League athletes, but humanities scholars. And Colin himself studied intellectual history at Duke and Oxford and for the longest time was planning on being an academic. Here's the craziest thing. Despite running one of the best performing hedge funds on Wall street for the last 20 years, despite making billions upon billions in returns, it's clear that he doesn't really care that much about money. As crazy as it sounds, Colin's returns almost seem accidental, a consequence of pursuing his genuine intellectual interests, what he calls following the fun.

Johnathan Bi: In this interview, you're going to learn how Colin's intellectual curiosities led to his best investments, how to decipher a company as if close reading a text, and the limitations of reason in both investing and faith. My name is Jonathan Bi. I'm a founding member of Cosmos. We deliver educational programs, fund research, invest in AI startups, and believe that philosophy is critical to building technology. If you want to join our ecosystem of philosopher builders, you can find roles we're hiring for, events we're funding, and other ways to get involved on johnathanbi.com/cosmos without further ado, Colin Moran.

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1. Companies as Cultures

Johnathan Bi: So Colin, if you go to the team page of your fund's website, here are some of the profiles that you would be met with managing partner, Duke BA History and Economics, Oxford Master's Modern Intellectual History, analyst, UChicago BA in Classics, Notre Dame PhD in Theology, Chief Compliance Cfficer, Juilliard Bachelor's and Master's in Music, and this is the one that always gets me Office Manager, Bachelor's of Music Piano Pedagogy. Why has this group of humanity nerds been so successful at running a hedge fund?

Colin Moran: It had a lot to do with an appreciation of kind of businesses as human organisms. It's really easy to just see them as abstractions and like thinking of companies as having cultures and thinking of them as sort of human ecologies. And if you think of them that way and if you kind of try to understand them in those terms, you end up with a lot of insights that you wouldn't get if you're just looking at them as financial entities. What you always are trying to understand are who are these people? And even knowing which people matter is a big thing in most companies.

Johnathan Bi: Right. Because it's not obvious from the org chart, right?

Colin Moran: Yeah, well, typically the CEO is very important, but who's really calling the shots and kind of where the energy is in the organization, where the value is really being created inside the organization, those are not obvious from the outset. And the rewards to the person who can kind of find a really exceptional culture, those are big.