This year's presenting sponsor for Invest Like the Best is Ramp.
Ramp has built a command and control system for companies' finances.
You can issue cards, manage approvals, make vendor payments of all kinds, and even automate closing your books all in one place.
We did an incredibly deep dive on the company and its product as part of this new partnership, and what we heard and saw in customer surveys over and over again was that Ramp is the best product by far.
We've been users ourselves since I started my business, since long before I was able to spend so much time with the founders of Ramp and their team.
Over the holiday, I was with Ramp's founders.
Those that listened know that I believe that the best companies are reflections of the people that started them and run them.
I've always loved the idea that Apple was really just Steve Jobs with 10 ,000 lives.
Having gotten to know Ramp's founders well, I can tell you that they are absolutely maniacal about their mission to save people time.
As far as I can tell, they do not stop working or thinking about the product and how to make it better.
I'm sure they're proud of what they've built, but all I ever hear when I'm with them is them talk about what they can do to improve and expand what Ramp does for its customers.
I used to joke that this podcast should be called, This Is Who You Are Up Against.
I often had that same thought when I'm with Ramp's founders Kareem and Eric.
I would not want to compete with these guys.
I wish all the products I used had a team as hell -bent on making the product better in every conceivable way.
I could list everything Ramp does here, but the list would be stale in a week.
I highly recommend you just start using it to run your business's finances today.
This year, I'll share a bunch of things I'm learning from these founders and this company, and I think it'll make you realize why we are so excited to have this partnership with them and why we run our business on Ramp.
To get started, go to ramp .com.
As an investor, staying ahead of the game means having the right tools, and I want to share one that's become indispensable in my team's own research, AlphaSense.
It's the market intelligence platform trusted by 75 % of the world's top hedge funds and 85 % of the S &P 100 to make smarter, faster investment decisions.
What sets Alphasense apart is not just its AI -driven access to over 400 million premium sources like company filings, broker research, news, and trade journals, but also its unmatched private market insights.
With their recent acquisition of Tegas, Alphasense now holds the world's premier library of over 150 ,000 proprietary expert transcripts from 24 ,000 public and private companies.
And here's the kicker, 75 % of all private market expert transcripts are on Alphasense, and 50 % of VC firms on the Midas list conduct their expert calls through the platform.
That's the kind of insight that helps you uncover opportunities, navigate complexity, and make high conviction decisions with speed and confidence.
Ready to see what they can do for your investment research?
Visit alphasense .com slash invest to get started.
Trust me, it's a tool you won't want to work without.
If you're attending the InvestOps conference in Orlando this year, I'll be speaking at Ridgeline's private breakfast event on March 11th.
Ridgeline gets me so excited because every investment professional knows this core challenge.
You love the core work of investing, but operational complexities eat up valuable time and energy.
That's where Ridgeline comes in.
Ridgeline is an all -in -one operating system designed specifically for investment managers, and their momentum has been incredible.
With about $350 billion now committed to the platform and a 60 % increase in customers since October, firms are flocking to Ridgeline for good reason.
They've been leading the investment management tech industry in AI for over a year with 100 % of their users opting into their AI capabilities, putting them light years ahead of other vendors thanks to their single source of data.
You don't have to put up with juggling multiple legacy systems and spending endless quarter ends compiling reports.
Ridgeline has created a comprehensive cloud platform that handles everything in real time from trading and portfolio management to compliance and client reporting.
It's worth reaching out to Ridgeline to see what the experience can be like with a single platform.
Visit ridgelineapps .com to schedule a demo.
Hello and welcome everyone.
I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best.
This show is an open -ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money.
If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus Review, our quarterly publication with in -depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing.
You can find Colossus Review along with all of our podcasts at joincolossus .com.
P -S -U -M dot V -C. My guest today is Devin Zügel.
Devin is the founder and president of the Esmeralda Institute, and she is creating a new town called Esmeralda in California wine country.
Learning of Devin and her plan, I couldn't help but wonder why there are more people building new towns.
She shares the origin story of her project, a modern reinvention of the Chautauqua community she cherished growing up.
And we explore her fascinating work building communities and reimagining how we live together.
We discuss how environments fundamentally shape human behavior, how cost of space impacts creativity, the financial challenges of town building despite their potential for strong returns, and the plans in place for Esmeralda.
Please enjoy this fascinating conversation with Devin Zugel.
Devin, I have to start by asking where your obsession with places came from.
What are the ingredients of this deep interest of yours?
Oh, such a fun question.
I think it came from realizing just how much environments shape the way I think, the way I feel, and the way I behave.
Even from small things like the shape of the floor plan of an office can make a huge difference in the way that team members interact and the weather outside affects how much I go outside.
And the layout of streets ends up affecting whether I walk somewhere or I take a car and realizing I'm kind of obsessed with trying to make my life better and make better decisions.
And I realized that it's way easier to make better decisions if your environment supports and enables it.
And so I've gotten really interested in the question of how do I shape my environment so that it shapes me in the ways that I want.
Give us a sense or a flavor of some of the things in the environment that shape you or the way that you think that might surprise us.
So here's a silly one, but it's so true, is if I have my phone next to me, as it is right now versus behind my computer screen where I can't see it, I will not use my phone if it's behind the screen and I'll just forget that it even exists versus if it's next to me, I'll check it every few minutes and see
if I have notifications.
And so actually I'm going to hide it behind my screen right now.
And at a more macro scale, I think how close you live near a friend makes a huge difference in how likely it is that you'll see them and the context in which you see them.
So if you live on the same block, you might go just knock on their door and say, hey, what are you up to this Saturday?
Let's go do something.
But if you live a 10 minute walk away, you might text them before you go.
And if you live 20 minutes away, you're going to probably plan ahead and you're going to say, let's meet at this time on Friday night.
And so just realizing how much we are shaped by the distance of different things in our environments has been a huge unlock for me.
And so I've tried shaping my own life such that the people that I want to spend the most time with are ideally as close to me as possible and the types of food that I want to eat and the types of activities I want to do.
And I think it really makes a huge difference.
So proximity is one key variable or dimension of your setup in life.
What are the other key variables that interest you most?
I think another really interesting one is cost of space.
And you see this play out in just the way a restaurant might treat you.
If you're in a restaurant in Manhattan, you can tell that the restaurant wants you to eat your food, get out, pay the check so that they can turn over the tables because that seat is expensive for them.
Versus if you're in a lower cost city where the real estate isn't so expensive, there's often a little bit more of a, it's okay if you sit there for three hours and chit chat with your friends or at coffee shops in Manhattan.
I think they often will glare at you if you ever have your computer out because they know that you're going to be sitting there forever.
Whereas if you're in a diner in the middle of Nebraska, they're probably going to let you sit there for a while longer.
So I think cost is really interesting.
And it also shapes the types of activities that people do.
One theory that I've heard, I don't know, it's hard to test this, but one theory I've heard for why startups have taken root in California, especially the apocryphal startup garages for all the early companies, was because in California, there are these garages that are warm enough most of the year
that you can actually work in them.
And there's sort of this extra cheap space that is attached to a lot of people's homes.
And so they turned into the workshops of various inventors and people who created things, whereas on the East Coast, your garage is freezing cold half the year.
So I think when you end up being able to treat space as something that's cheap and something that you don't necessarily have to pay for, you end up getting a different type of creativity coming out of it and more things that take a lot of physical space.
What's the origin of your ambition to try to combine all the things you've learned about space to a very ambitious project that you're building in California?
Maybe at a high level, describe what you hope to do and then why, what the backstory was.
Yeah. I grew up going to this town in Western New York called Chautauqua.
My grandmother lives there.
It's a small town of about 8 ,000 people.
It was built about 150 years ago.
I'd visit her every summer and the thing that's really special about chautauqua is that for nine weeks every summer chautauqua hosts what they call the season which has workshops lectures performances it has a symphony orchestra an opera and a very active theater you can kind of picture it like a college
campus except it's multi -generational and i grew up going there and it's been my favorite place in the whole world since I was a little girl.
But it wasn't until a few years ago, I brought my husband there for the first time.
And as we were walking around, he just asked me a simple question, which was, why aren't there more places like Chautauqua?
Why is this the only one?
And that literally stopped me dead in my tracks.
It felt like a movie almost.
I was like, wow, that's a great question.
Why isn't there? Because I'd been a fish in water, not really thinking about how Chautauqua came into being and why that wasn't more common.
And so that was about five years ago now and took me down the rabbit hole and I just kept thinking about it.
And basically I ended up realizing I need to build a new Chautauqua in California, which is my home state and where my family is and my friends and my network.
And so basically I'm building a modern version of Chautauqua.
On a degree of difficulty scale, how hard is it to build an entirely new town?
It seems so much like America is what it is.
You don't hear about whole new towns anymore.
You hear about very fancy, high -end discovery land properties or something like that that are designed from scratch, but usually not just a normal town.
Why doesn't that happen very often anymore?
Why doesn't it seem to?
On some level, it shouldn't be that hard because we know how to build buildings.
We know how to build roads.
This is not rocket science.
We're not making a technical breakthrough.
But you are empirically correct that when you look around, there aren't a lot of new towns being built up.
I think part of it is that there's sort of the sense that the frontier is closed in the United States.
And I feel like it's more than just the physical frontier.
I think that a lot of people in a lot of industries feel like we're at the end of history.
And it's almost a more like philosophical reason.
I could answer this question in a lot of ways.
I think on one hand, I could answer this philosophical level.
There's also a lot of technical reasons, but I think the biggest answer is just, it's not in the space of things that people think are normal to do.
But if you think about it, every town that exists had to be started at some point, someone was the first person to move in.
Somebody built that infrastructure.
And I think it's just something that we've done less and less of.
And as that frontier has closed, the physical frontier more and more of that space has been taken up and a lot of the really good locations for towns and especially for big cities is probably also taken.
Maybe you could walk us through the most inspirational places that you've been in addition to Chautauqua that form some of the ideas for what will be, I think you call it the hardware of Esmeralda, your new town.
What are those elements?
Where did they come from?
I'm so curious how you decided what matters and gets to go into the project.
But way before I started working on this project, I've been really obsessed with urban design and in particular street design, because I actually think that streets are the single most important building block in a city.
The way that the streets interact and how they interface with buildings and other public spaces is really the thing that defines the feeling of a city, in my opinion.
And I've been studying and writing about it and befriending architects and developers for the last 10 years.
And really, my poor husband, every time we travel somewhere, it's really an architecture tour where I talk to him all the time like, oh, did you see the setbacks of this building from the street?
Like, oh, it's interesting that they're mandating a 20 -foot setback here.
And so really, the biggest answer I would say is from my travels and just taking really detailed notes and making a lot of observations about the choices that are made in different cities and what works and what doesn't.
And it's actually not a binary thing.
either. It depends on what your goals are.
Is this community trying to be an industrial hub where a lot of big manufacturing happens?
Is this trying to be a resort community where people can relax?
Is this a place that's meant to be multi -generational or is it targeted towards a particular generation?
And so tracking those things and building a very rich mental model of the specific details has been the most fun thing for me, honestly.
That's my favorite thing to think about.
If you think about somebody that buys a house there and lives there for a year, what do you hope is the way that that person describes Esmeralda to someone that hasn't been there?
Oh, that's so fun. Okay.
I'll give you a little persona of the type of person that I think would particularly love living in Esmeralda.
So basically somebody who is an adult, who's got a young family, but also maybe their older parents or even their grandparents are still alive.
They can all live in this community together, which is my experience at Chautauqua.
I would stay with my grandmother and we'd have three and sometimes even four generations all in the same home.
And I think I'd like them to describe it as a place where their kids have a lot of independence and their kids can get around on foot rather than having to ask to be driven everywhere.
A place where there's a really high level of trust within the community.
and when you walk outside you are very likely to meet people who share your values and those values specifically being a love of learning and creation but also of invention and building new things.
I love the values that Chautauqua has I think we would build on that but I'll also point out two major values differences.
I think on one hand Chautauqua is much more about lifelong learning than it is about building.
I think it's more of a place where you absorb a lot of information and experts come and talk.
I don't want to downplay the cool things that Chautauqua are doing either, but it's much more of an emphasis on reading and consuming and learning.
But I think I want to take that and build on it and also create more of a sense of action and people building businesses, creating pieces of art, doing research, that kind of thing.
So that's one difference.
and then related to that is having it be a sense of more like peer -to -peer so in chautauqua there's more of this sense that jane goodall will come and she'll talk to you about chimpanzees and she presents on her experiences and people talk about it for a little while but then it moves on versus jane
goodall herself being part of the community and then hosting an expedition with the kids in the community to go meet some chimpanzees and having it be more of a peer -to -peer where it's not sage on the stage, but rather the people around you are experts in their field, but you are also an expert in your
field and creating that network.
So I think those are the key values and experiences that I would love for people to have in this community.
What things will you put there that make it easier or more fun to create and innovate together?
How do you actually promote that in a town setting?
You alluded to the hardware and software before.
And so while we're currently building the hardware, which is functionally real estate development.
I mean, at the end of the day, we're putting in infrastructure and we're building buildings, and that is what real estate development is.
So that's the hardware side.
And that has a very important role to play in this, where, as we were talking about before, environments really shape the behavior that we do.
And so on that side, we are building infrastructure and public spaces and event spaces where people can have these types of events.
Really, you can think of it like a college campus where we're going to have lecture halls and pavilions and things like that throughout the community that will support this type of activity.
On the software side, we've actually gotten things started because it's going to take a while to build all that hardware.
And so we've got it started with this pop -up village that we organized called Edge Esmeralda.
And you can think of a pop -up village kind of like a temporary college campus.
We host it in Healdsburg, California, which is 15 minutes south of the property where we're building the hardware.
And for this pop -up village, it runs for 30 days each summer.
And many people attend for the whole month, but also a lot of people come for just a week or just a weekend.
Last year, we had 1 ,300 people attend Edge Esmeralda.
And this year, we think it might be even a little bit more than that.
And with Edge Esmeralda, we're experimenting with a lot of these ideas.
I think last year, one of the key things that we did was we hosted nightly community dinners and they're not required to come.
Many people will not come to every single night, but there's always one time and place during the day where you can come together and talk to the other people in the community.
And honestly, we're taking a lot of lessons from how colleges work, like a dining hall where people come and you always know that you're going to bump into some friends and there's going to be a table with someone interesting to talk to.
If you don't want to go to the dining hall, that's fine.
But it's an option that's available.
And I think those learnings that we're getting from Edge Esmeralda, which is a prototype for the permanent community.
