Mala Gaonkar: Building SurgoCap, Identifying Great Businesses and Learning from Mistakes

Hi, everybody. I'm Nicola Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. And today, I'm really happy because I'm here with Mala Gangkhar, who I've known for a long time, actually. Mala founded Sergocap with $1,800,000,000, and now it's at $6,000,000,000. And before that, she spent twenty three years as a founding partner of Lone Pine Capital, one of the most successful hedge funds of all times. Great to have you here. Great to be here, Nikolai. Thank you. Tell me about ServoCap Partners, you know, your company. Yeah. ServoCap tries to do what many investment firms try to do. It tries to beat the market, over a three to five year cycle with less risk than the market. A risk defined as loss of capital, not volatility. And the way we try to achieve that is by identifying this very small handful of truly great businesses that exist in the world, and we do that through a our product is really our process, a very transparent process of looking for very specific factors that really are distillation, as you pointed out earlier, of my lessons I've learned, the many mistakes and lessons I've learned, from investing over twenty three years with some of the best, people in the business, my former colleagues at at Lone Pine. And so that distillation has led to SSURGO. There are many different factors that lead to identification of a truly brilliant business. But the way I define a great business is a business with very long duration motes, and duration really is our true differentiation. So motes being that it's difficult to compete with them, it's difficult to compete them up. How many great companies are there in the world? As I said, a small handful. I don't think there are that many. We focus on really four verticals where I think there is a bit of an edge, from a one very specific factor is techno every business is a technology business. Mhmm. Right? So if you're an aerospace company or a medtech business or a financial data business, you are a technology company in your backbone. If you wanna deliver at scale and with quality, you have to be a tech business. And I think understanding the tech stack map of businesses is something we spend a lot of time on, especially in non tech businesses. I think that's one. The second is how old technologies can disrupt in very new ways. So if you think about something like, we've talked about this, but the auto industry, which employs far more people in the tech industry, but it's being disrupted right now by, you know, technology that was invented in 1976, you know, the, the the the lithium ion batteries. So I think that is that's always interesting to me, or, you know, in when, you know, we started investing in Korea, we were buying GPUs to, you know, make our video games look a little little little more fun. …