My Conversation With Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Founder of Colossus & Positive Sum | David Senra

[static] You have this almost obsession with finding talented but not well-known or relatively unknown people.

Mm-hmm.

And then you essentially spend a lot of time talking to them, developing relationships, and then putting all of your resources behind that person.

Yeah.

What is going on there?

Well, uh, for how my personality is wired, that is the most exciting possible thing to do, because it means I get to learn about a person and whatever they're doing before other people do, and I like that. I like being at the frontier of what's going on and learning things that aren't widely known. I just, I just enjoy that. I, I read so much and sp- I've spent my whole life just as a constant learning-type person, so to find something fresh and new is, uh, very exciting to me, and you can usually do that with people like this. And then I've just learned about myself that by far, my favorite thing in the world is championing other people. That's just what I enjoy doing. If I look back on my life, the, the sort of, like, wins that I've had, the, the things that if you were to write, like, a Wikipedia article about me would be, like, the accolades or the accomplishments, I don't care about those things. I don't think about them. When they happened, they didn't do anything for me, emotionally or otherwise. Um, uh, uh, for whatever reason, I just- that's just not what I enjoy. But when your success happens or when many other people that I and my team have championed have a win, I feel that deep in my, like, soul, and heart, and gut in a way that is just more gratifying to me than anything else in the world, and this extends to my kids, my wife, my friends, my... You know, the CEOs of companies that we've invested in, um, people that we have on, on our show that we tell the world about, that's the repeated thing that I, I love. And I also kind of like picking sides. I like saying, "I like this person," and, and, and by extension, I like them more than the other available options in this field or this industry or whatever, and I just get tremendous joy out of that. So now I'm architecting my life to just be able to do as much of that as possible, and, and, uh, I hope I get to do it for a long time.

I screenshotted this text. This was, like, many years ago. Somebody was asking me-- I can't remember who it was now, but they were asking me, like, what Patrick is like, and I was just like: Well, positive sum is definitely, like, a way to describe him. I was like, "And he doesn't do things for money." Like, that doesn't mean he's not commercial. Like, he makes a lot of money. He's gonna continue to make a lot of money, but that's, like, not the driver behind it. Let me go back to, like, the cr- one of the craziest days of my life has directly involved you, right? Like, I was, like, in the middle of this, like, five-and-a-half-year struggle of, like, being obsessed with something I know I truly cared and thought was really good.