

Mohnish Pabrai Lecture at Boston College
Monopolies Versus Competitive Businesses
- Peter Thiel's frame: businesses fall into monopolies/near-monopolies or intensely competitive spaces.
- Avoid wasting time in brutally competitive businesses; prioritize firms with durable monopoly-like advantages.
Unexplained Edge At Rain Industries
- Rain Industries proved to be a persistent low-cost producer even though management rarely explains the edge.
- I followed it for six years and the numbers made the advantage tangible despite not knowing exactly why.
AWS Was Born From Quiet Iteration
- Amazon iterated cheaply and opened internal platform capabilities to outsiders, which birthed AWS over time.
- Keeping innovations under the radar can buy a time advantage that makes competitor catch-up very hard.
Distinguished Speaker Series Professor Arvind Navaratnam October 14, 2021
(00:00:00) - Introduction
(00:02:04) - Competition is For Losers, Peter Thiel
(00:08:25) - Rain Industries
(00:12:39) - Monopolistic business models, Amazon and Google
(00:17:14) - Redoing the Spaghetti code, AWS in business
(00:19:09) - A Whale only gets harpooned only when it surfaces, Warren Buffett
(00:20:00) - AWS, cloning by Microsoft and Google
(00:24:15) - Monopolistic characteristics of giant Chinese tech companies
(00:28:19) - Tencent (under)reporting style
(00:30:24) - Naspers business model, Koos Bekker
(00:40:58) - Better capital allocation by Amazon and Tencent
(00:43:37) - Tencent business model
(00:50:24) - The bazooka Model of Pony Ma
(00:57:33) - How I became a value investor
(01:02:22) - Chinese tech giants and political risk
(01:03:16) - Dakshana Foundation’s Education Model
(01:09:01) - Evolution of my investing style
(01:12:58) - Mohnish’s investing framework on start-ups
(01:17:31) - Ali Baba
(01:23:18) - Competence and edge
(01:24:54) - Change in Investment strategy due to Covid
(01:37:50) - Application of NLP (Natural Language Processing) in investing
(01:45:10) - Up and comers in the investment sector
(01:47:40) - Quality of Management
(01:50:29) - Book recommendations