BobCasey

Proud Chicagoan. CEO of Santa Barbara Management, Partner @ PFC.
Fmr. Tegus, IGSB. Always curious, never bored.

[Acquired Podcast @AcquiredFM]

Tomorrow.

"Do not allow the tyranny of compounding costs to overwhelm the magic of compounding returns."

-Jack Bogle

[BobCasey @BobCasey]

In November of 2020, @TegusHQ ran its first paid ads - as presenting sponsor of @InvestLikeBest with @patrick_oshag.

Tegus co-founder Mike Elnick cut a deal with Patrick where we initially paid $20k per month ($5k per episode). We'd been growing at at a steady clip, and thought ILTB would help us get in front of more of our target customers.

That was a good bet. In November of 2020 we added ~$600k in net new ARR. In December we added $1m+. We attributed that to typical end-of-year software buying habits, even though it felt like half of our new inbound clients were telling us that they heard about us via the podcast.

The sales kept ramping. Fast forward to February of 2021, and we had our first month of $2m in net new ARR. A few months later and we had our first $3m month. ILTB turned out to be an incredible channel.

Patrick had a captive audience that perfectly overlapped with our target customers at Tegus. It was the ideal advertising channel for our product.

Given our high average contract values and our strong conversion rates, we could have paid far, far more than we did initially to advertise on ILTB. In time, Patrick realized that - and we did too. Pricing increased dramatically - by 5x, then 10x, then 20x+ what we initially paid - yet we were very happy to pay it.

@djrosent and @gilbert create incredible content. I absolutely love @AcquiredFM, and I know so many founders, CEOs and investors who feel the same way. It's unsurprising to me that they're able to command these rates. So awesome to see their success.

[Evan Armstrong @itsurboyevan]

everyone talks about TBPN making 20M in ads, but no one talks about how @AcquiredFM is pricing their midroll at 4.7M (goddamn)

[BobCasey @BobCasey]

@santiayz @andrew__reed Gosh...

[BobCasey @BobCasey]

https://t.co/9lOxa9CaNU

[BobCasey @BobCasey]

@gerstenzang Congrats Sam! Excited for you and Dan

[BobCasey @BobCasey]

@austinbishop Wow. Means a lot. So impressed by what you're building, Austin. Would love to meet.

[BobCasey @BobCasey]

https://t.co/Lb8DfW62tW

[Brett Caughran @FundamentEdge]

Really enjoyable read.

I had a chance to meet Bob and Tom in ‘23 when I was invited to Chicago HQ to give a seminar on “what’s investors do all day”

Conceptually, expert network transcripts are a relatively simple business that may cause one to think “I could do that too”, but it was super apparent to me that day how locked in they were on the customer problem and how impressive of an execution machine they built to achieve that vision. Insanely nice people too.

The Tegus team deserves all the success they achieved.

[BobCasey @BobCasey]

@CharlieZvible Thanks @CharlieZvible. Great to see what you, Jack and the team are doing with the combined platform - the product gets better every month!

[BobCasey @BobCasey]

@AIHighlight @Founder_Mode_ Claude

[BobCasey @BobCasey]

@preston_holland @FoundersPodcast James Dyson

[BobCasey @BobCasey]

@ashthaker1 @patrick_oshag Thanks Ash! They can email me directly - Bob [at] SBManagement [dot] com

[BobCasey @BobCasey]

:)

Just wrote about this:

We believe portfolios should have three buckets. The boring bucket: liquidity plus low-cost index exposure. The advantage bucket: investments where you have real edges within your circle of competence. And the fun bucket: One of the benefits of substantial wealth is that some things can be done for enjoyment, so long as they’re appropriately sized

https://t.co/772UkXoyxr

[BobCasey @BobCasey]

@chrishlad @hanoverpark Congrats, Chris! So excited to see all that you are building.

[BobCasey @BobCasey]

...and one could note the importance of the same criteria in assembling a portfolio: resilience, non-obviousness, uncapped potential!

The nice thing in publics vs. venture though is that there's a near-zero cost way to buy the index and ensure exposure to those outsized winners

[BobCasey @BobCasey]

This dynamic holds in public markets just as it does in venture! Research by Hendrik Bessembinder @ASU shows that most U.S. stocks have generated lifetime returns lower than one-month T-bills. Roughly 4% of companies account for the entire net gain of the U.S. stock market since 1926, and an even smaller group (the “Mag Seven” type names) driving a disproportionate share of those returns.

[Ho Nam @honam]

This is an insightful blog post. People who don’t understand will inevitably gravitate toward playing venture lotto (https://t.co/aHoW1NlrP9).

“The Power Law is what happens to your portfolio if you select for resilience, non-obviousness, and uncapped potential. It is the destination, not the map.”

[BobCasey @BobCasey]

Yes.

I want to know how Buffett consumes his morning media diet in painstaking detail. I want to see how Zuck runs a 1:1 with Susan Li or Andrew Bosworth. I want to understand how Anna Wintour plans a weeknight dinner party.

https://t.co/A5ozokD5Pb

[Will Manidis @WillManidis]

great moment in the cheeky pint episode with dan sundheim where daniel presses him to walk through his average earnings morning in exhaustive detail, both w/ and w/o a crisis

i wish more interviews would do this: how you do the smallest things is how you do the biggest things.

[BobCasey @BobCasey]

At Tegus we always said that our goal was to build a product that delivered beta, not Alpha – selling Alpha is a highly limited TAM. Selling beta is a much better business.

In an end market full of companies with Alpha in their name, you never saw the word in any of our materials :)

[BobCasey @BobCasey]

@businessbarista ai