Klaus Hommels: Why "Portfolios are Merely a Construct to Make LPs Happy"? | E1231

Venture is not sitting in a nice office with borrowed power of LPs and playing like in old Caesar's times, thumbs up, thumbs down. I'm not so keen of building portfolios. If I find cool companies that make a difference, that is where the beef is. And if you have one or two of them, every portfolio looks great. I do believe that if you see the right company, you should take a lot of risk and over-proportional risk in those.

Are you price-sensitive, Klaus?

Absolutely not.

Ready to go? Klaus, I am so excited for this. I wanted to make this one happen for quite a few years, so thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you very much. Uh, it's a pleasure. So, (clears throat) to finally, after that long years, uh, the wait was worth it because, uh, you have become an icon. So, uh, now I'm the underdog here.

(laughs) Well, I mean, flattery will get you everywhere. But I wanna start with a crucial first question, which is one that I haven't phrased quite like this before. Adidas or Puma, and how did Puma lead to the start of your investing journey?

Well, (clears throat) so you obviously did your homework. This is a very crucial question. So not in terms of the sports shoes, obviously, and as a Swiss German, I should say, that is on, but as a life lesson. Uh, Puma made a very big impact, and I guess that you always have, like, two or three of those in your life. And Puma was, was the halo moment for me. So as you know, (clears throat) I grew up in the German countryside, hence my crazy accent here. And, um, it was close to Mönchengladbach, and I was the son of a farmer. So, um, at 16, 17, 18, I knew a lot about how to work in the fields and do all this nasty work that nobody ever wants to do in that age. But I was lucky that my grandma wanted me to hate banks. Uh, and the way she thought about it was, "Look, I give you, um, 20,000 bucks, and you buy stocks. If you gain something, it's yours. If you lose it, I cover it." And she thought I go to the local saving and loan bank, get a bad stock recommendation, lose the money, and I'm mad at the bank. But, um, as it turns out, my, uh, affinity to, for football, yeah, and Mönchengladbach, (clears throat) was that they played in Puma shoes. And Puma did the IPO, and I said, "Look, Grandma takes the losses so I can go in fully leveraged." And at the time, I was making 10 bucks pocket money a month. I made 100,000 with Puma in three months. So I said, "Look, two phone calls, 100 years of pocket money, I become investor." So and at that moment, um, the, the, the s-, the, the sail was set for what I wanted to be in the future.