12 August 2026
7 shows published 13 episodes in the period, 11 hours in all. These are the 7 minutes worth hearing.
Investment
Capital Allocators
Pat Dorsey, founder of Dorsey Asset Management.
Dorsey built Morningstar's moat research framework and ran its equity research for a dozen years before launching Dorsey Asset Management in 2014, now a $1.7 billion global public equity manager. He holds about twelve positions, and says his own weighting has moved from roughly 70 per cent business quality and 30 per cent management at launch to close to the reverse today.
-
1 of 3 framework
Pat Dorsey screens management for humility, on the basis that it is easier to identify the teams unlikely to blow up than the ones likely to do something remarkable.
Dorsey's read of Theranos, Wirecard and Enron is a refusal to listen once voices in the room said the path was wrong, so his three questions are: what would you do over, which board member gives you the best advice, which direct report would you least like to lose. His second tell is a boss who conflates himself with the business, like the Australian chief executive still leasing his own head office to the company long after it mattered.
-
2 of 3 explainer
Dorsey Asset Management stayed out of CoStar's push against Zillow after judging that a founder who had sold down would keep spending through a failure he had never experienced.
Dorsey reads alignment off pronouns and filings: a chief executive who talks about the company as though he owns it while holding half a per cent through options is aligned with himself, and so is one who relocates head office somewhere warm and leaves staff to uproot or resign. The pattern-recognition case ran the other way, since CoStar had already won in commercial real estate data and then in apartments.
-
3 of 3 contrarian
Pat Dorsey treats founder mode as venture capital promoting its own asset class, because raising money and recruiting believers is not the skill of running five thousand people.
He allows movement in both directions, naming Zuckerberg as a founder who acquired the second skill set and Larry Culp at GE as a hired chief executive who delivered one of the better turnarounds. What he refuses is the benefit of the doubt: a business earning several hundred million should face the same interrogation whoever is running it.
Worth listening to in full
Most clips above stand alone. These are the episodes that justify the whole hour.
Pat Dorsey on Assessing Management and Avoiding Blow-Ups
Twelve minutes, already cut down from a longer conversation, and close to all of it is usable. The material outside the three clips, on why 'trust me' managers carry left-tail risk that a twelve-stock portfolio cannot absorb, and on chief executives being handed a capital allocation job they have never practised, is worth the remaining minutes.