#872: Graham Duncan — Talent Is the Best Asset Class (Repost)

What It Covers

Graham Duncan, cofounder of East Rock Capital managing $2 billion for a small number of families, explains his frameworks for evaluating talent, building high-performing investment teams, and developing clearer thinking. The conversation covers reference-checking methodology, identifying hidden assumptions, career development models, and how time perception shapes decision-making across professional and personal domains.

Key Questions Answered

• •Reference-Checking as Primary Tool: Treat references as the core of evaluation, not an afterthought. Call 20 people, make it safe by guaranteeing confidentiality, and use a net promoter score (1–10) to force specificity. After four references, patterns repeat and you can stop. On-list references still yield high signal because people exhaust their scripted praise within ten minutes and begin revealing nuanced, unfiltered assessments.
• •Credibility Formula for Talent Assessment: Borrow the McChrystal Group framework: credibility equals proven competence plus relationships plus integrity. To assess integrity specifically, ask how someone behaved during the 2008 financial crisis. Periods of extreme stress reveal behavior that normal conditions conceal. This single historical stress-test question surfaces more about character than hours of standard interview questions about values or work ethic.
• •The Aggression-Humility Tension: The highest-performing investors hold two seemingly contradictory qualities simultaneously — aggressive conviction when sizing positions (moving from zero to 20% of a fund without hesitation) and genuine ethical restraint in how they conduct transactions. Duncan calls this being "commercial" versus "transactional." Commercial operators visibly create more value than they capture, which attracts other high-quality partners and compounds relationship capital over time.
• •Originality Plus Triage as Performance Predictor: Top performers generate a disproportionately high volume of original ideas — researcher Dean Simonton found Bach composed roughly 100 times more pieces than average composers. But idea generation alone is insufficient. The best portfolio managers pair originality with ruthless triage: they can force-rank their portfolio, kill their own ideas without emotional attachment, and make live trade-offs under pressure without hesitation or sentimentality about prior positions.
• •Surfacing Hidden Assumptions Through Coaching: Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan's adult development model frames growth as moving assumptions from "subject" (invisible, controlling you) to "object" (visible, examinable). A skilled coach identifies where your grip is tightest — beliefs you cannot articulate the opposite of — as a signal that ego or identity is entangled. Once named, the assumption becomes object. Byron Katie's four-question method (Is it true? Can you absolutely know? How do you feel? Who would you be without it?) operationalizes this process.
• •Career Development as River Navigation: Careers follow a river model with two banks: rigidity (apprenticeship, learning others' frameworks, refining reality) and chaos (asserting original reality, founding ventures, paradigm creation). Healthy development means swimming between both. Starting a venture too early, before sufficient apprenticeship, risks losing feedback with shared reality. The most original contributors — Jobs, Musk — swim closest to the chaos bank, but flopping onto it entirely produces magical thinking with real consequences.
• •Time Billionaire Framework for Priority Calibration: A million seconds equals roughly 11 days; a billion seconds equals 31 years. A 20-year-old likely has close to two billion seconds remaining. Tim Urban's life calendar — a poster showing 90 years as weekly circles — makes this visceral. Duncan uses it displayed in his kitchen as a daily anchor. The practical application: calculate finite remaining interactions (carrying a child on shoulders, visits with aging parents) to force concrete prioritization rather than abstract intention.